As I prep for a (hopefully) minor medical procedure, here's an early weekend posting, to keep y'all from going too ravenous!
Here’s an article about phosphorous recycling – including pee-recovery, in the New Yorker. "Rich Earth's Urine Nutrient Reclamation Program’s restrooms are equipped with four kinds of urine-diverting toilets." Um as I described and predicted almost two decades ago in my novel Existence. Morocco has over 70% of the world's phosphate reserves. And soon the King of Morocco will be richest person on Earth. Florida used to have the large phosphate deposits, now almost gone.
New insights into earth's structure: The predominant geological model of our planet incorporates four distinct layers: a crust and a mantle (composed largely of silicate minerals) and an outer core and inner core composed of nickel-iron. Now a team reports finding evidence for another distinct layer (a solid metal ball) in the center of Earth’s inner core – an “innermost inner core.”
Meanwhile, there is ambiguity and disagreement over seismic indications that Earth’s solid iron inner core may have slowed its spin-rotation as part of a rhythmic (70 year?) cycle. Very preliminary. Still, call Messrs Strauss & Howe of “The Fourth Turning,” which I've discussed in a past blog posting.
== “Futurism” accelerates…especially regarding AI ==
A brief summary of my core belief about the future – backed by science – is distilled here at Imaginezine: “Imagining… and evading… the Quicksand,” where I discuss our most-human quality - "anticipatory imagination".
Can science and art overlap? 60 or so years ago, C.P. Snow wrote about the “Two Cultures” of intellect who had great difficulty communicating across a divide of preconceptions and even language. Indeed, that insight may have been valid, when Snow wrote it, provoking widespread discussion. But times change. A decade ago, I commemorated half a century since that disturbing essay, showing that almost nothing about the “Two Cultures” missive was any longer true. See my essay: The New Modernism: Blending Science, Engineering, Art and Human Imagination.
In fact, ever since my undergraduate days at Caltech, I have seen the diametric opposite! True, that was in vanguard California. But across all the years since, I have never known a top scientist who did not have some kind of artistic hobby or sideline! From Einstein's violin and Feynman's bongos and painting to Murray Gell-Mann's expertise in Finnegan's Wake. And nowadays many artists (like Sheldon Brown and Bruce Beasley) immerse themselves into sci-tech, in order to do their art. (Does my own art count? If so there are many examples. See this article on Scientists that were also novelists, which includes Carl Sagan, Gregory Benford, Robert Forward, Fred Hoyle... and David Brin.)
A recent example is Dale Stuart. Dale has an ScD from MIT in aerospace engineering. Her thesis: Guidance and control of tethered rendezvous in space at the end of long trapezes. After she left MIT, she worked in aerospace for a few years, then shifted gears. Winddance, Dale's freestyle skydiving dance project reminds me of Spider Robinson's award winning novella "Stardance" where zero g dancing impresses aliens into communicating.
Under the category of things that make me go “hmmm?” This is what happens when you swamp any field with brilliant young minds. “The number of science and technology research papers published has skyrocketed over the past few decades — but the ‘disruptiveness’ of those papers has dropped, according to an analysis of how radically papers depart from the previous literature.”
== Biotech research ==
Tissue cultured meat – long predicted in sci fi – is rapidly approaching prime time (so to speak). The planet, our health, our karma and eventually our wallets will all benefit hugely. Even if it becomes like tilapia - the healthiest and by far eco-best fish – slightly in need of extra seasoning, that’s still a wonderful prospect.
According to Peter Diamandis: "cellular agriculture or stem-cell based meat production, a field that is poised for rapid demonetization. Over time, producing a cell-based beef burger has fallen 10,000-fold from $1M/kg in 2000 to about $100/kg in 2020. This cost is expected to fall below $10/kg by 2025, thus creating a mass-market cost-equivalent way of replacing beef at minimal environmental cost and reducing animal slaughter. Similar price reduction is being seen in stem cell-based chicken and fish.
"This technology will allow the production of beef, chicken, and fish anywhere, on-demand, and will be more nutritious and environmentally friendly than traditional livestock options." Technologies first seen widely in the classic sci fi novel, The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth.
And here’s a great reason to accelerate meat alternatives: ‘Incredibly intelligent, highly elusive’: the US faces new threat from Canadian ‘super pig’ - Northern states on alert for invasion of cross-bred pig that threatens flora and fauna – and is difficult to stop. And emerging from the spreading kudzu, down south, are the feral tuskers. And when they meet and hybridize...
We warned you guys. Didn't we warn you?
== Convergence & quantum mechanics ==
Physicists use quantum mechanics to pull energy out of nothing: Some are familiar (from ‘Stargate?’) with the concept of Zero Point Energy… that the ground state in a vacuum still fizzes with quantum fluctuations which average zero… and it should be impossible to tap (usefully) any of that. Well, unless… unless you throw in entanglement, the spookiest thing in physics. Which (it seems) can let you put energy in at one place and then tell someone how to extract it from the vacuum(!) usefully, somewhere far away. In other words… teleportation. Don’t get excited now. It’s a pretty darned limited kind! But still…
Speaking of convergence, now of the evolutionary kind, it seems like the echolocation abilities of bats and dolphins aren’t just functionally similar. They appear also to arise from very similar shifts in specific genes. Wow. Gimme dat. Also the hibernation of bears, camel kidneys and the flow through lungs of birds. And titanium-ceramic bones and smart self-repair and…
But what's keeping me swamped is all this AI stuff.Very little of it making any sense at all, alas.
151 comments:
Dr Brin in the main post:
Um as I described and predicted almost two decades ago in Existence.
You're trying to make me feel old?
I bought and read the hardcover version of Existence in the summer of 2012. Much closer to one decade ago, even if the book wasn't brand new at the time.
Re CP Snow and the Two Cultures
Scientists have always participated in the "arts"
The other side - the people who study "The Classics" at University - are STILL ignorant of any numerate knowledge
And they are STILL in charge in most of the Anglophone world
I will need to re-read the Two Cultures but as I remember it even then CP Snow did say that the "Science" people were also knowledgeable in and interested in the arts
Larry Hart - you're not old. I still have my autographed first edition of Sundiver.
I first ran into the concept of cellular self repair in an A E Nourse story, where an alien's cell repair system was treating a human surgeon's attempt to do gross organ repairs as a foreign invasion...talk about feeling old.
Regarding the attitudes of classicists - mandarins or Oxford grads - I should point out the words of one Maine classics student and professor: what he had learned was how to learn - an ability he put to good use defending his patch of Little Round Top on Jul 2, 1863.
Pappenheimer
P.S. - I look forwards to trying kill-free meat when it comes within my price range. Mrs. Pappenheimer is more leery but admits that in a meat loaf or sloppy joe, there probably won't be much difference in taste.
George Monbiot has been talking up precision fermentation technology as a source of cheap mass-produced protein replacing livestock for a while (was recently impressed by the degree to which printing technology has enabled well-textured cuts)
As for cross-bred terror pigs? If it's environmental horrors you're talking, Australia has you covered
Tony Fisk,
@Alfred, erm, you do realise your EGB piece and its loops backs up my 'curved logic' comment?
I'd like to nod sagely or leap to my soapbox to refute, but the truth is you lost me on the curved logic response. If there is a good joke in there and I'm spoiling it by asking for an explanation... I am truly sorry. 8)
I was riffing on our host's view of the composition of a human mind as a mini-UN. Made me think of the traeki's.
@Alfred Oh, it was related to your riff about How EGB got you seeing loops in reasoning.
That, and DP insisting everything was belief based which, to my mind, sounded like Godel's Theorem on closed systems in action. Closed loop -> curved logic. I suspect it wouldn't pass the review board.
The traekis always improve discussions of this sort.
Bill C:
I still have my autographed first edition of Sundiver
I meant I felt old because Dr Brin said Existence was two decades ago.
No need to feel too old, Larry. Existence was published in 2012, which means it isn't two decades old, although it's just entered its second decade.
Mind you, the second act is based on the story 'Lungfish' which first appeared in 'The River of Time' about thirty five years ago.
Now I feel old.
Yesterday, SpaceX lost a booster, a Starship, dozens of Raptors, and an unknown amount of infrastructure. They gained oodles of data & experience, and proved to the FAA that they can fail safely. The real magic is in how fast they stand up another (improved) machine for launch. This is how you get to Mars. WTF have we been doing for the last 50 years? I'm reminded of the zombified colonists in TOS episode "This Side of Paradise".
We've been sending robots.
Tony Fisk:
Now I feel old
Nothing yet has supplanted Casablanca as my favorite movie.
Of course, that one was already an oldie when I first saw it. But the fact that The Godfather just celebrated its 50th birthday gives me pause. And there are middle-aged adults for whom Star Wars was always around.
More nostalgic walllow: I recently had cause to refer to the lyrics of Supertramp's 'Logical Song'.
Watch what you say, or they'll be calling you a radical. A liberal. Oh, fanatical. Criminal.
A popular song at the time (1978-9), and apt words for current events, but I wondered if the reference was a bit obscure for today?
@Tony Fisk,
I recall a Mad Magazine bit which I would have seen around 1978 or so. It was called something like "Things that make you feel old".
One of the items was "Your secretary has never heard of The Beatles." Further down, a later item (including the italics) was "Your secretary has never heard of Wings."
In that same year of 1978 (I remember clearly because it was the year I left for college), I distinctly remember a news item about The Rolling Stones touring, and the newscasters were poking fun at how old they were--in 1978. They're still touring today!
LH, if memory serves, the witty folk called it "The steel wheelchair" tour. And that was long enough ago my hair, mostly, had color.
From a parody concert poster ~30 years ago:
Rolling Stones Live !
plus Keith Richards
I've also seen, in some parody movie or other, a poster for "Rocky XXXV" showing a aged and shrunken Stallone. It might have been that "Airplane II" thing.
Pappenheimer
scidata said...
"Yesterday, SpaceX lost a booster, a Starship, dozens of Raptors, and an unknown amount of infrastructure. They gained oodles of data & experience, and proved to the FAA that they can fail safely. The real magic is in how fast they stand up another (improved) machine for launch. This is how you get to Mars. WTF have we been doing for the last 50 years? I'm reminded of the zombified colonists in TOS episode "This Side of Paradise"."
In addition to using an "iterative development process" SpaceX also intends to build hundreds of Starships and from the very beginning they have been developing the manufacturing capabilities to do so at the same time that they have been developing the flight hardware. Some examples . . .
1) They currently have 6 Starship prototypes ranging from complete to mostly complete, and 4 more at earlier stages of construction. There are many changes incorporated in these, progressively. Ship 24, the one that made this first test flight, is actually pretty old and already outdated.
2) There are currently 3 Super Heavy booster prototypes ranging from complete to mostly complete and 4 more at earlier stages. Again, many changes to later versions.
3) Earlier this year they reached 1 per day production of their Raptor 2 engines, which is used on both Starship and Super Heavy. The engines are also still being developed.
4) They have been steadily building more production and testing facilities at their Boca Chica location.
5) They are building a large production facility at Cape Canaveral that looks to be larger than what they've built at Boca Chica. Not just on paper. The main building (huge) is complete, though no doubt there is much fit out to do in the interior, and a "Mega Bay" building, where they stack the vehicles, is well under way.
6) They are building a launch platform and tower, what they call stage 0, at Cape Canaveral, and it is well progressed. The 500' tall tower and the platform structures are up.
7) They are apparently planning on building another stage 0 somewhere because they have built all of the sections for another full tower at their Cape Canaveral building site.
This video is already out of date, 2 months old, but I had it at hand. Starting at about 8:35 it shows some aerial views of the Starship related construction SpaceX is doing at Cape Canaveral.
SpaceX Breaks New Ground with Epic Static Fire: But how powerful was it really?
SpaceX is all in on this. Aside from their usual fast pace and ultimate goals they need to get Starship working at least well enough to start putting their Starlink 2 satellites into orbit as quickly as possible, because Starlink has the potential to fund all of their development work but the newest generation is too big to launch with Falcon 9 (fairing dimensions).
Pappenheimer:
I've also seen, in some parody movie or other, a poster for "Rocky XXXV" showing a aged and shrunken Stallone.
Was that in a "Back to the Future" film? The one where they actually went to the future?
Larry,
Je ne sais pas. My mind is littered of pop images like that, sometimes connected to other memories, sometimes standalone. Past references to futures that didn't happen - isn't there a word? Zeerust?
Pappenheimer
Larry & Tony,
My mother used to complain about how old she was when she was approaching 70, so I told her:
"You're only as old as you act." I haven't heard a complaint since, and she just turned 80 in February.
No matter how old you get, you can always take the long way home.
PSB
Tony,
I think it was you who referred to Buddhism and Taoism as possibly god-free religions in the previous thread. Being married to someone whose native culture has been largely Buddhist for 1200 years, I've picked up a few things. Buddhism is polytheistic, but as far as they are concerned, gods are irrelevant. Anyone can earn enough karma to be reborn as a god, but being a god is only temporary. They use up their merits, kick the bucket, and next time around they're a mosquito or something. Out of curiosity, I visited a Tao temple in Tainan, and everyone there was busy worshipping their local deities. Funny how Benjamin Hoff never mentioned that. Lao Dze's basic idea there is that you do whatever you need to do and find a way to enjoy it. If you've got gods around, do what they demand of you so you don't piss them off. Gods act pretty much like arrogant teenagers, so at least look like you're groveling. That's pretty much true for every god I've run into, including the one that's so stuck up It demands we call It God.
PSB
PSB:
No matter how old you get, you can always take the long way home.
I don't worry about being old in the sense of "closer to death." No, it's the physical decline itself that makes "feeling old" a thing.
Lao Dze's basic idea there is that you do whatever you need to do and find a way to enjoy it.
Which doesn't require a deity to give it meaning. It doesn't even require cojones, although those do help with the enjoying part.
Tony Fisk,
Oh, it was related to your riff about How EGB got you seeing loops in reasoning.
Ah. Okay. I see it now.
...DP insisting everything was belief based...
Yup... but I kinda agree with him on that... just not the way he'd recognize as agreement.
Faith as the religious people practice is actually a form of loyalty to an ideal. We all do that even if it isn't to the same ideal. We also divide our loyalties between big and small ideals without much risk of running afoul of the First Commandment.
That Atheism is a faith requires there be something to it to which one can be loyal. For some of us... that is indeed the case but for many it isn't.
If we all quit using 'faith' to imply 'belief of a proposition' this would be much simpler. I can believe that 2+2=4, but I'm not loyal to it in any sense. I can work with Euclid's parallel lines axiom (no intersections), but I'm not loyal to it. [In fact I am quite disloyal to it because I see it as a mere choice.] I AM loyal to Ms Liberty depicted on older US coins, but I see no need to anthropomorphize her. The depiction of her as a Great Lady is just a convenience. Etc.
------
I don't think any of us get along in life without some ideals to which we are loyal. The usual one few think about is loyalty to self. We all have some understanding of who we are and we tend to be loyal to that mental model. Not everyone does this (I've met self-haters), but a whole lot of us do.
------
I haven't got it quite as bad as scidata who sees Seldon and Asimov behind every bush (snork!), but I DO see Hofstadter's strange loops pretty much everywhere. They aren't the same as circular logic, but they do refer to themselves. If we could map the landscape of our minds, the geometry would be decidedly non-Euclidean.
scidata,
WTF have we been doing for the last 50 years?
Lots... and not just sending robots.
Ponder if you will how few people understand the history behind personal computing and the roads not taken. Ponder that and the fact that many have actually TRIED to tell those stories.
What has been going on with respect to the space frontier for the last 50 years involves many people I know, but almost no one has tried to tell those stories yet. What you see is just the froth that managed to attract the attention of journalists.
Billionaires playing with rockets to get to Mars suddenly comes out of left field? Pfft. Before them were the multi-millionaires. Before them were the millionaires. Before them were the people will to spend whatever they had to push the envelope.
There is a huge story behind and in parallel to billionaire boys and their rockets. Huge. I know some of it and know people who know a lot more of it, but only a tiny fraction of it has been told.
My little part of it helped get a multi-millionaire many of you would recognize involved, but he was heading in that direction before we met. He's not in the field anymore because it took way more money than he had, but people entering the field recently have learned from him and get started AND further on amounts similar to what he could afford to risk.
What happened in the last 50 years was hugely important. It had to happen to get where we are now. The government funded and led approach to open the frontier sputtered and collapsed as many of us in the private sector forecast. That's not all there is, but it's hard for journalists to see the little mammals scurrying underfoot as the dinosaurs perish. Tiny mammals have been working on opening the frontier for at least 40 years, but we needed the thunder lizards to collapse and leave niches open to us.
I can work with Euclid's parallel lines axiom (no intersections), but I'm not loyal to it. [In fact I am quite disloyal to it because I see it as a mere choice.]
Well, the Universe is only Euclidean up to a point. It is useful to calculate pi to about 100 decimal places, after which it might as well be an exercise in random number generation.*
*Hmm: are transcendental numbers just damage the Universe routes around? Greg Egan would have fun with this!
@PSB No, it wasn't me referring to Buddha etc. although I see the point. As for age, well I am now living the old Beatles song, but am not about to sincerely waste away yet!
@Larry I recall a Mad magazine from 1968 with a cartoon lampooning Star Trek! (the transporter beam was not kind to Kirk)
And there was that Simpsons episode with ads for the upcoming Star Trek XXIV movie, with poor old rotund Scottie no longer able to reach the controls (it shows how rapidly social mores have changed recently that jokes like this are no longer considered acceptable. On the other hand, a future Homer is also seen drooling after soylent green, which... still seems to be OK!?)
Alfred Differ,
I'm not an Asimov fanboy - he had his warts. And Seldon is only a literary character, not sure if one can 'believe' in such. If we could map the landscape of our collective minds, we'd have psychohistory (not ideal gas laws or statistical mechanics). If we could map the landscape of our individual minds, few of us would. There's safety and comfort in delusion. As Freud said, total freedom is super scary because it comes with total responsibility. There's some SF about AIs that go insane or suicidal because of this, perhaps a survival trait that we have and they won't.
I completely agree about the personal computer stories, spaceflight dreamers, and tiny mammals. I said what have we, but really I meant what have they (the thunder lizards) been doing.
Alfred
What was going on before
We got trapped into following a mirage - Single Stage to Orbit - and that mirage got in the way of the development of re-usable boosters
Tony,
…the Universe is only Euclidean up to a point…
Heh. Minkowski-an. Separating time from space-time is observably wrong at any scale, but did need reasonably modern equipment to prove it. Newton couldn't have known.
I suspect the whole notion of continuity is a byproduct of minds who like to believe in a God who can do anything at any scale and any level of precision. We had infinity since the ancients… but it was countable!
Scidata,
I enjoy you connecting some of what goes on around us to Asimov, Seldon, and psychohistory even if I disbelieve in the possibility of psychohistory absent Vernor Vinge's Transcendentals from the galaxy's rim. Seriously!
…but really I meant what have they (the thunder lizards) been doing?
Specializing to their environment to such an extent that they abandoned niches. The US dinosaurs ACTUALLY abandoned commercial launch. Didn't see a future in it. Gave it up to non-US launchers! Argh! (My inner 'American Spirit' was offended, but it WAS what we predicted.)
The specialized thunder lizards literally left a door open for well funded competition and couldn't believe it would ever be sniffed at by a curious mammal*. My friends in the movement worked damn hard to keep the US Congress, FAA, and BATF from adopting rules dictated by those dinosaurs… and partially succeeded. Other friends worked at turning starry-eyed wanna-bee CEO's into 'something interesting' to venture capital people. A few others tried to get prizes funded. To the dinosaurs, though, we appeared amateurish. They LITERALLY scoffed. (I saw it with my own eyes.) Now they are f@$%ed and I am guilty of schadenfreude. HA!
Duncan,
…trapped into following a mirage…
Some were. The dinosaurs saw a lot of money to be made with cost-plus contracts by pitching such things. Endless R&D dollars pitched as a way to keep a certain set of skilled people employed based on a national security need.
It looked spiffy from the outside. The Power Point presentations were a wonder to behold at conferences! Try digging up the final reports from their funded work, though, and you'll see what the real objective was. Our Congress kept people employed because it was good politics. It didn't really matter if SSTO would fly.
The mammals knew better. We also knew better than to compete with federally funded programs. Venture capital people won't take your call if you compete with government entities who don't give a fig about profits.
* I'm not referring only to Musk. Though he is the biggest of those mammals right now, he wasn't back then. He 'only' had one order of magnitude more dollars he could afford to risk than another guy I knew.
"Homer is also seen drooling after soylent green, which... still seems to be OK!?.."
Well, Homer is a transgressive character. Even more so in the early shows, IIRC. If he's now a role model we are all in deep kimshi.
What I took away from Buddhism is its lesser vehicle/greater vehicle thing, which is also part of the Hinduism it was a reaction to. Those who really thought about it pared away the Pratchett-style Small Gods, while the populace were cool with the accretions and syncretism. If you lived on the lower levels of society in East and South Asia, a festival or three each year made life a bit easier. It still does.
Pappenheimer
P.S. I'm still hoping some groundbased launch system a la Pournelle's articles and fiction will come to fruition, at least for cargo shuttles. Keeping your main engines down here seems like a massive cost saving. However, I'm no engineer: either the startup costs must be too high, or the propulsion method is unproven tech. Except for the cannon method, which at the very least would make Verne's ghost happy.
We can up with a story we used to explain the need for multi-stage ascent to orbit. We thought it pretty neat and patted ourselves on the back more than once. I still think it works though the particular technology for each leg of ascent is not what I imagined it would be.
———
Imagine you are a fish. You are a member of a high IQ species and live in a thriving community near the sea floor. You've all sent explorers high, low, and across to visit other places and learn what you can, but your place is ideal. The depths are dark and your crops don't grow there. The heights are turbulent, bright, and too warm at times. Across great distances there are a few other ideal places and your people establish colonies that occasionally survive a while before some event causes a loss of contact.
Scholars know of the Sun and Moon and are pretty good at predicting the cycles of currents that seem connected. Ideas abound as to why these connections are what they are, but traveling to them seems impossible. The heights have a top where the water just stops. Breathing is not possible any higher.
———
I could go on and on with the story, but it's a set up for a simple question. If you were such a fish, how would you get to the Moon? Would you build a big rocket that took you from the sea floor to orbit? That's essentially what we do when launching from the ground, though the troposphere isn't as thick. If you think SSTO might work for humans, can you imagine it working for the fish? Probably not, hmm? Chances are you'd use staged ascents.
My friends wanted to make the case that we should be using giant airships to float as high as possible and then launch to orbit. Max Q for current vehicles occurs at a relatively low altitude where the air is not all that thick but they are moving so fast that it might as well be thick. Wouldn't it be helpful to start higher up? Isn't that the technical solution the fish would eventually find?
If you look at the Falcon 9 you'll see a two stage vehicle with the first stage optimized for suborbital flight. Its engines push the stack until it's about 70 km up and moving around 8,000 km/hr. The boost peaks around 120 km and then comes down again to land and be reused. If you watch any of the descent videos you'll see it picks up speed on the way down getting back near 8,000 km/hr before they slow it to save wear and tear that would occur when the atmosphere slows it down later below an altitude of about 40 km.
So… okay. Falcon 9's booster is not an airship, but it operates in the same range we had in mind and a little above it. We imagined ours would take a smaller vehicle up about 30 km, it would launch from there, and we'd provide a place to land there later. It was a neat idea, but I think everyone (including me) has been convinced that the simpler problem to solve was to land on the ground, launch from the ground, and otherwise keep the booster in the lower atmosphere at speeds way below what is necessary for orbit. Airships are a royal pain in the behind in the lower troposphere where weather is the primary culprit in killing them, so booster vehicles make a whole lot of sense.
As for upper stages, it really doesn't matter. Once you are high enough you can push to orbital speeds even without a nose cone. On StarLink missions they ditch the fairings around 100 km up… and then recover them as best they can. On StarLink missions the upper stage is mostly picking up speed at that point and any altitude gained is added very slowly. That means the F9 upper stage is a different kind of rocket. It's engine bell is optimized for a vacuum and it really should be thought of as a "push for speed" vehicle compared to the booster which is a "push for altitude" design.
For upper stages, the fish would likely have to settle for the same kind of design we do. Push for speed. Only a silly fish would try to combine all this into a single stage to orbit, though. Think of the structural mass you'd need to fly at any reasonable speed from the sea bottom. Nah. You'd do your best to keep the speed down and Push for Altitude.
———
So… why not three stages? If one is silly and two makes sense, why not more? Well… where do you land them all? If your intention is to throw them away, multi-stage rockets can make more sense. If you want to make money flying other fish tot he Moon, though, it gets pretty silly. Three from the ocean floor might make sense because your middle stage would land on a platform you could float at the surface. Maybe. Weather at the surface gts quite messy, so I'd still bet against it. Let your booster reach zero velocity at the surface and then sink slowly using buoyancy tricks to orient it before it gets to the bottom.
———
My friends thought these kinds of thought experiments helped designers who could not expect Congressional job program cashflows. The stories got a few raised eyebrows at conferences, but the guys designing and building two stage vehicles just nodded. They thought our airships were nonsense, but the rest of it was about right.
This is likely to remain true until we can build elevators.
I wonder if someone will start using a scram jet for the lower stage.
Incidentally, XKCD has some topical entertainment lined up for your weekend.
with mobile-blood vehicle.
Alfred Differ:
If we all quit using 'faith' to imply 'belief of a proposition' this would be much simpler.
Faith in the religious sense means (or seems to me to mean) loyalty to something which cannot be verified, at least not by the living. One may squint a bit and see atheism as fitting that definition in the sense that "You can't prove a negative." But where DP is wrong about mere semantics is that Don't-Care-Ism or whatever you'd like to call it is a different thing.
"Not making a choice is making a choice" because whatever, but "not loyal to a proposition" is not the same thing as "loyal to the proposition's opposite."
I can believe that 2+2=4, but I'm not loyal to it in any sense. I can work with Euclid's parallel lines axiom (no intersections), but I'm not loyal to it.
Dave Sim said it well, before he himself turned religious. "There is no Church of Newton's Laws in which we give thanks that on object at rest or in motion remains at rest or in motion until acted on by an outside force. What exactly would we be giving thanks for?"
I AM loyal to Ms Liberty depicted on older US coins, but I see no need to anthropomorphize her. The depiction of her as a Great Lady is just a convenience. Etc.
One reason it is so hard to convert the confederates among us. They are fiercely loyal to the ideal of white supremacy in a way that, as you say, is more than simply "I believe that there is a race of man superior to all others." That sort of faith has the ferocity of devotion to a lover, or to a respected father or king.
I don't think any of us get along in life without some ideals to which we are loyal. The usual one few think about is loyalty to self. We all have some understanding of who we are and we tend to be loyal to that mental model. Not everyone does this (I've met self-haters), but a whole lot of us do.
This, I believe, is the crux of Sartre's despair, and also why DP is mistaken in thinking that all atheists should logically despair the same way. If you've lived your life around loyalty to an Entity in which you lose your ability to believe, then sure, the next step is an anguished, "Then what is it all for?" Think of (spoiler alert) Winston in 1984 after he's made to realize that he can betray Julia given the right circumstances. Not much reason to live after that. Might as well love Big Brother.
My own atheism or agnosticism or whatever the appropriate term is probably came too early in life for me to have formed that sort of loyalty to the tenets of religion. Religion was something one seemed to practice because everyone else did it too. Realizing that everyone else seemed mostly to practice by rote rather than actually believing the supernatural aspects of religion were true--that was more akin to realizing there is no Santa Claus than it was to betrayal of an essential value. Whatever previously gave life meaning didn't go away.
Ayn Rand to the contrary, I can still enjoy a good meal for the sheer pleasure of it, without regard to what I plan to do with the energy afterwards.
Alfred Differ:
I DO see Hofstadter's strange loops pretty much everywhere. They aren't the same as circular logic, but they do refer to themselves.
Strictly speaking, the dictionary is completely circular. There is no word in there, not even "the", which is not defined by other words in the same book. One could therefore argue that language is meaningless. Which is as practical as arguing that bees can't fly.
Tony Fisk:
@Larry I recall a Mad magazine from 1968 with a cartoon lampooning Star Trek! (the transporter beam was not kind to Kirk)
I had that one too, although I think it was in a reprint "MAD Special" rather than the original.
a future Homer is also seen drooling after soylent green,
There were several different episodes with glimpses of the future involving Soylent Green. My favorite was the one with the label, "Now with more girls!"
Alfred Differ:
scidata,
I enjoy you connecting some of what goes on around us to Asimov, Seldon, and psychohistory even if I disbelieve in the possibility of psychohistory absent Vernor Vinge's Transcendentals from the galaxy's rim.
I'm not a singularity type. Nor even a Galactic Empire style Asimovian. Those are so far above my pay grade that I would embarrass myself by opining on them.
Computational psychohistory is not woo-woo level magic. It's at the other end of the spectrum - agent based modeling from first principles. Transistors and solder. The first stumbling block that many struggle with re psychohistory is the problem of public awareness influencing the equations. AI evades that altogether, similar to the robot objectivity in later FOUNDATION novels. The second is the equations themselves - formal mathematics (formulae). Waaay over my head. Diverse, locally algorithmic agents, interacting in really simple markets (an agora of sorts) is the route for me (with a side model in calculus for blackboard thinking).
Alfred Differ:
Billionaires playing with rockets to get to Mars suddenly comes out of left field? Pfft. Before them were the multi-millionaires. Before them were the millionaires. Before them were the people will to spend whatever they had to push the envelope.
By sheer coincidence, I just found a recent Robert Harris historical novel called V2, around the Nazi V2 rockets they launched at London toward the end of the war. If the novel's depiction is anywhere near accurate, Wehrner Von Braun was not a Nazi ideologue. He was someone so driven to develop space travel and get to the moon that he persuaded the Nazi regime to finance rocket technology with an unbelievable amount of money and resources. Of course, he could only do that by promising to produce a weapon for Hitler.
No matter how old you get, you can always take the long way home.
The worst part about getting old is becoming part of the scenery…
Larry,
Von Braun wrote an SF "novel" himself - Project Mars: A Technical Tale (it was translated from the German) - written in 1948, published as novel in 2006. He was a true believer in space travel. Who was complicit in the use of slave labor. YMMV.
Pappenheimer
"I'm not a singularity type. Nor even a Galactic Empire style Asimovian."
A promising start would just be to get a permanent colony off this rock before we undergo species self-extinction - which might be a first for this biosphere. We are behind schedule, people.
Papppenheimer
P.S. of course, a lot of folks I talked to in the early 80's expected a nuclear holocaust before 2000, so we're behind schedule there, too. Well done!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2AkkagsPdk
Hal Sparks at about 1:41 on the video, just after they go to a break on the radio. (Don't know exactly 'cause I'm watching it live)
98 percent of nihilism is emotional, psychological, and intellectual laziness.
And this also goes for libertarianism.
Pappenheimer:
He was a true believer in space travel. Who was complicit in the use of slave labor. YMMV.
From what I gather, he [Von Braun] was an ends-justify-the-means true believer. If it took slave labor and bombing London to get to the moon, then so be it.
Pappenheimer:
A promising start would just be to get a permanent colony off this rock before we undergo species self-extinction
I'm becoming convinced that our animal bodies might be so tied up in the biosphere of earth that getting "off this rock" might be analogous to an individual living outside his human body. Maybe not impossible, but way more complicated a prospect than we currently imagine. Certainly way more complicated than simply getting into a starship and stepping out onto a different planet.
Larry,
Early SF novel: Dauntless explorers have landed on new planet and exit the vehicle.
Spaceman Riff: Is the air breathable?"
Spaceman Biff: (takes helmet off and draws deep breath, does not keel over) "seems OK!"
Mrs. Pappenheimer (biology major) suspects that we will have a lot of problems with allergens if we actually get to go boldly explore strange new biospheres and they boldly explore us.
Pappenheimer
Among the most brilliant lines of SF ever written was:
"the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water"
- which was actually from the beginning of the book, not the end as in some screen versions
Unable to see well enough to read your postings. But well enough to type.
1. I clearly have the most erudite and intelligent and wordy comments section on the Web. Look at comments under any other blog or site and it's mostly barely simian grunts, even under sagacious postings bu famous mavens.
2. Okay mixed news about the SpaceX partial success+spectacular RUD. It's clearly "Stage Zero" that was the Big Mistake. Someone insisted that 60 years of NASA + ESA experience with LAUNCH PADS could be ignored. No diverter trench, no suppression water jets, etc, only a concrete base that got blasted into clouds of smithereens by the mightiest rocket ever made by this species. And a pretty blatant first guess theory is that some of those chunks hit rocket engines, likely explaining why at least six went out or flickered during launch. (The fact that the 1st stage kept chugging and climbing and trying, despite that, is incredible! People, we have a rocket! Just 6 months with no where to send it from!).
Plausibly very good news for Artemis and bad news for SLS, but those are separate matters)
Scott Manley takes you through it.
Overall, great news. Short term? Serious cost and delay amid a forehead=slapping "D'uh!"
Oh, we gave grants to a couple of 'make your own landing pad on arrival at the Moon or Mars" projects at NASA's Innovative. Advanced Concepts program - (NIAC).Look em up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8q24QLXixo
3). Oh #3... It appears that I am single digits away from getting the 125,000 followers mark on Facebook. NOT askiong for you to join FB if you aren't already on! But if you are...
Thrive & persevere
Oh, Pappenheimer, I cleaned up on bets with dumb pessimsts that there'd be no whales on Earth by the year 2000
Pappenheimer:
Mrs. Pappenheimer (biology major) suspects that we will have a lot of problems with allergens if we actually get to go boldly explore strange new biospheres and they boldly explore us.
I'm not a biology major, but I'm thinking of our interactions will microorganisms present in the environment. Will it be even as easy to grow food on another planet as it was for "The Martian"? I know some animals are intimate with the earth's magnetic field as well.
And those are just two things I know I don't know enough about.
Libertarianism can work well for organized crime. Someone gets in the way? Just kill them.
No need for them of BOTHERSOME regulations.
Re the launch tower being blasted to bits
Would simply making it 10 or 20 meters higher - moving everything up 10 or 20 meters - not massively reduce the effects on the base ??
Re: the launch tower being blasted to bits
Apparently there was to be a thick steel plate over the concrete but it wasn't ready in time. Given that this mission was 'lightweight' (empty Starship), and given that the booster made it to cut-off altitude anyway, couldn't they have simply used fewer engines?
Scott alludes to *someone* having pointed out that Mars is not flush with launch pads, so get used to it! (I hope this is not a serious observation!)
I am disappointed that people dedicated to the fail fast development cycle weren't able to take on the experience of others.
As Ricardo Semler puts it, effective intelligence is IQ plus all the other quotients, less ego.
I'm becoming convinced that our animal bodies might be so tied up in the biosphere of earth that getting "off this rock" might be analogous to an individual living outside his human body.
@Larry I have toyed with an sf scenario where we discover that life ceases to operate beyond a certain distance from Earth. This vicarious limit clearly lies outside the Moon's orbit.
Tony,
Scramjet booster? I hope not. At least I hope they don't on tax payer funded projects.
I think the jury is in on this. Boosters are for going up. Second(+) stages are for going fast.
Larry,
Von Braun probably defrauded the Nazi's and helped speed up the end of the war, but he was an ends-justify-the-means kinda guy. Fraud was one of his relatively minor crimes.
Most important, though, he typified an approach my friends were unwilling to use. Turning to the government to fund things comes in several flavors. Having them as clients is very different from having them as investors… and that's what is dying out with the new space companies. About damn time I'll cheerfully add. The wars of the 20th century ended a generation ago.
Pappenheimer,
I suspect Mrs. Pappenheimer is correct, but the problems will be bidirectional. We sluff off enormous amounts of our cells and microbiomes each day even without counting what goes into the toilet. Immune responses should be pretty wild on both sides for a while.
Larry,
If you've lived your life around loyalty to an Entity in which you lose your ability to believe, then sure, the next step is an anguished, "Then what is it all for?"
I've directly encountered a related question. I was asked by a believer how I deal with the hole in my heart. She couldn't comprehend that there would be no hole for someone who did not grow up with that ideal to lose.
…probably came too early in life for me…
My mother did that on my behalf with FULL intention… and said so many years later. When I was a kid she explained it as wanting me to make up my own mind when I was capable of it. As an adult it was clear she wanted me to see it the way a uneducated street kid ponders reading and writing. Really? I need that? Don't believe ya!
———
Dictionary entries are poor representations of meanings of linguistic terms. They're the best we've got, but they are piss poor not because the system loops, but because the system recurses so tightly that its non-linearity is hard to represent on a page… with linear writing. Not even a markup language will cover the difference.
It's not just that word definitions depend on word definitions. They depend a great deal on what it means to be human. It's quite possible they are central TO what it means to be human. Try fitting a person into a dictionary and you won't get far. 8)
On that note, I recommend Pip Williams 'Dictionary of Lost Words', a thoughtful coming of age tale set against the publication of the Oxford English Dictionary and the suffragette movement, with a nod to indigenous languages.
scidata,
I suspect a Singularity is possible, but I don't think it will be trivially done. Most likely it will look like a singularity in the derivative of change (acceleration) because we've already experienced those.
I'm thinking of the kind of change that happens to a stuff made of molecules. At low temperatures the vibrational modes are frozen out as ways to stash heat, but at warmer temperatures they suddenly become available. Boom. Specific heat has a jump discontinuity.
Life on Earth has seen these discontinuities several times, though short-lived humans might not think they were sudden. Recent human history has one of these when Enlightenment Civilization caught fire in Europe and then spread.
I suspect discontinuities can happen to the base function too. Large minds can do things that small minds can't even begin to imagine. My cat and I share much in the way of emotional complexity, but I doubt she'd grasp arguments related to Existentialism.
———
I'm still not convinced that psychohistory as I understand the concept isn't woo. The first version I read made it sound like a thermodynamics-like theory of large human communities. I don't think it is possible to build one that can do anything more complicated than predict we behave a lot like other mammals. My disbelief is centered on the notion of generating useful aggregates in a system that looks inherently 'open' to me. By open I mean "Not enough information (ever) to generate refine-able predictions from known initial conditions". Open Universe in the sense that Karl Popper described.
Thermodynamics starts with wonderfully (astonishingly!) useful aggregates like pressure, temperature, and others and posits the existence of state functions that depend on them. Everything after that is done as partial derivative tricks expanding a function as a summation for approximation purposes. Really neat trick!
But what are the useful aggregates for human communities? Macro-economics is built much the same way and it's a hazy mess with a poor track record at making ex ante predictions.
Maybe one of V Vinge's transcendentals could figure us out… but I rather doubt it. (How's THAT for hubris.) I suspect the ONLY viable way is to emulate us. Micro instead of Macro. No useful aggregates.
Tony Fisk:
This vicarious limit clearly lies outside the Moon's orbit.
You mean because we've already walked on the moon, so why not other bodies as well?
I don't doubt we can last for a finite period encased in spacesuits, or potentially (with a breathable atmosphere and the right temperature and radiation levels) for a finite period exposed. I mean, I myself have stepped into minus-26 Faherenheit temperature air with nothing more than a sweater (just to see what it felt like). It didn't immediately kill me, but I wouldn't have wanted to spend the night or anything.
Brief exposure is one thing. I'm wondering about extended day-to-day living, eating, sleeping, adjusting to the day/night and seasonal cycles, dealing with native trace elements and microbes, dealing without the trace elements and microbes we're used to, that sort of thing.
Alfred Differ: I'm still not convinced that psychohistory as I understand the concept isn't woo.
I'm not either. Occasionally, not here in CB but elsewhere, people approach me with wide eyes and salivating jaws wanting 'in' on the greatest jackpot of all time (political, financial, ideological). I then greatly disappoint them (my lifelong special gift). For me, it's all about the transistors, tinkering, and 'loopy' little experiments - definitely not forecasting Great Events. I'm not as infatuated by aggregated metrics as physicists and economists are. I'm more interested in 'evaporation' as you once put it, which has become a valuable insight and touchstone for me.
The calculus side model (more Asimovian) is just a shorthand, and is as limited as formal math and logic usually are in the end (especially in the hands of a clod). The real model is quite mindless and lacking in intention or goals. I'm not a Richard Daystrom, trying to imprint my engrams on a duotronic substrate. And I'm not an Ebling Mis, about to unwittingly hand the keys to the kingdom to some sociopathic monster. There are no such keys, at least not in my pocket. I'm more like the kid who finds a plastic magnifying glass in a box of candy corn and soon hankers for a microscope, just as most of us are.
In (mostly) unrelated news, I see that LEGO has chosen Virginia as fertile ground for its latest foray. There's something enlightened in the state of Denmark.
https://cleantechnica.com/2023/04/21/esg-much-lego-to-launch-carbon-neutral-factory-in-red-leaning-virginia/
scidata:
The calculus side model (more Asimovian) is just a shorthand, and is as limited as formal math and logic usually are in the end
When I first read the original trilogy (what the kids today would call "O.G. Foundation") the juxtoposition of calculators and slide rules and blackboard diagrams with the theorems of psychohistory added the correct amount of verisimilitude to the narrative. "Yeah, that's what a mathematician describing this stuff would look like."
And I'm not an Ebling Mis, about to unwittingly hand the keys to the kingdom to some sociopathic monster.
To be fair, Mis wasn't in the process of revealing technical secrets of psychohistory. His aborted revelation was simply the location of the Second Foundataion.
Alfred Differ:
I was asked by a believer how I deal with the hole in my heart. She couldn't comprehend that there would be no hole for someone who did not grow up with that ideal to lose.
What she didn't comprehend was that we all experience such holes--often for things that we miss, but sometimes also for things we never knew we were missing. The deeply religious assume that their need for God to fill a whole is universal and objective. I never felt a "God-shaped hole" in my being, but for years when the original was unavailable to be viewed, I had a "Star Wars shaped hole" in my heart, which was only filled a decade or so later when I could finally purchase a VHS tape (yes, I'm old) of the original unadulterated version of the movie.
If that sounds trivial, that's kind of my point. The feeling of lacking something one once had or something one really needs is nothing more significant that Commander Data's finding his neural responses to friends expected and "missing them when absent".
@Dr. Brin: Get well soon!
Oger:
@Dr. Brin: Get well soon!
Yes, your mention of reading (or lack thereof) gives a clue to the nature of the procedure, which on the one hand doesn't sound life-threatening, but on the other hand, for a writer, does sound unnerving. Best wishes for a good outcome.
Pappenheimer,
RE the greater & lesser vehicles, there's a bit of propaganda in the names. Mahayano (The Greater Vehicle) has become by far the dominant tradition in Buddhism of the past several centuries. They call their main competitor Hinayana (the Lesser Vehicle) because that makes Mahayano sound better, but Hinayana Buddhists call themselves Theravada. The doctrinal difference is a bit like the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. Theravada Buddhists only accept the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama himself, while the Mahayano work from a slew of holy texts written centuries after old Siddhartha ascended to wherever. To be a little more specific, Theravada says that a person can only save himself from the Wheel of Karma through meditative practices and avoidance of harmful habits. Mahayano added the idea of earning Buddha Brownie Points by helping other people, and the idea of the Boddhisatva, a sort of saint who could get to Nirvana but sticks around to help others achieve that state.
Would this count as "need to know" or meaningless trivia?
PSB
Dr. Brin,
Cataracts? Whatever it is, here's hoping ...
PSB
In recent news there have been shootings in which old people with guns shot random people who happened to be at their doorstep or in their driveway, and claimed that they were scared. Regardless of what anyone thinks about gun control, I would like to suggest that we all spread what we know about how the amygdala becomes hyper-sensitized when exposed to too much fear, to the point where irrationality gets baked into the system. Politicians the world over know that an easy way to get people to vote for them is to create some scapegoat for people to fear and hammer on the "be afraid" message. People who are insufficiently skeptical and believe this bull can easily become pathological over many years of exposure. Several years back, Dr. Brin pointed out on this forum studies that demonstrate this hyper-sensitization in political conservatives. Obviously, since there is a bell curve for everything, not everyone goes to these extremes, but enough do to create a whole lot of death and misery. As far as I know, long-term synaptic potentiation might be reversible, but probably takes much longer than it took to set in, so rehabbing political junkies is an ify proposition. I think if more people understood this mechanism and how it happens, more people could be convinced to take a more skeptical approach to political propaganda.
If you know anyone important or influential, that much the better.
PSB
@PSB, to your point, this says it all.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/opinion/desantis-trump-popularity.html
Consistent displays of dominance matter more to Republicans than consistent displays of principle.
@Larry: If my memory and experience
serves, a lot can go wrong even in minor medical procedures, as a natural risk. I wonder If over there, in the US, is a procedure most properly translated as ,"Patient Information", wherein the Patient declares acceptance of all possible Risks...
(Btw, the Term used for those declarations of acceptance is "Aufklärung", the Same used for Enlightment. )
Oger:
I wonder If over there, in the US, is a procedure most properly translated as ,"Patient Information", wherein the Patient declares acceptance of all possible Risks...
I don't know if there's an official name for it, but yes, we have to sign something attesting to our understanding of the risks involved with anesthesia, threat of infection, and the like.
The obvious...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/21/opinion/republicans-abortion-guns-big-government.html
This gets to one of the most important truths of political life. At times, the state will treat different groups in different ways. For those of us with more egalitarian sentiments, the goal is to make that treatment as fair and as equal as possible. For those whose sentiments run in the other direction, the task is to say who gets the worst and most degrading aspects of the state’s attention and who gets its concierge service.
They’ll say that the deity is on their side;
immediately ask them:
whose side is the deity on?
We’re on the defensive—without being hostile, turn the tables on them;
if they reply they’re on the side of truth, ask them whose side truth is on.
Otherwise they won’t listen.
If you keep up the pressure, they will pay attention.
scidata,
…I then greatly disappoint them…
Excellent choice. Best done early and often. If they put you on a pedestal and THEN get disappointed, you'll both get hurt when they knock you off of it. 8)
I'm not sure why you connect "psychohistory" to transistors and tinkering, but that's probably my failing to care much about the robot revision Asimov introduced when fitting his robots into the Foundation timeline. I was very interested when it was first coming out because I hadn't read the robot stories yet, but after I did I felt a little let down. I had training in physics by then, so my idea for what psychohistory might possibly be was probably too fixed for where Asimov took the timeline.
I'm not as infatuated by aggregated metrics as physicists and economists are.
Heh. The Cosmos threw us quite a curve ball with them. Some work astonishingly well. Some enable seductive theories people can't bring themselves to see as failures. For example, whether I recognize pressure as fundamental in continuous matter or as a statistical average related to momentum transferred to a surface by colliding molecules, I still get useful information on how to distill alcohol efficiently. Thank God For Whiskey or we never would have produced steam engines and their internal combustion descendants. These wonderful tricks turned toward economics have produced less stellar results. Those turned to producing a theory of history wound up enabling rationalizations for killing tens of millions of people in the 20th century. So… quite a wicked curve ball. Maybe even a knuckle ball. 8)
———
I'm more like the kid who finds a plastic magnifying glass in a box of candy corn and soon hankers for a microscope, just as most of us are.
Amen.
Oger,
…wherein the Patient declares acceptance of all possible Risks…
Yes. There is. It pretty much has to be done or the lawyers will eat doctors alive when something goes wrong. Lawyers still do a LOT of eating, but well informed patients who sign documents have to work harder to extract malpractice settlements.
There is a limit, though. I had to be hospitalized in late 2013 and I'm sure I signed a lot of documents, but I was so anemic I was in a brain fog. Had something gone wrong (it didn't… quite the opposite in fact) my next of kin could have made a case out of me not being competent enough to BE well informed. My wife filled that role for me on that day… and that's an example of why married guys live longer. 8)
———
There's always something that can go horribly wrong in any procedure. Infections are high on that list. Infections by super bugs are a definite risk in modern hospitals. Best we can do is state the odds and impacts and help patients make informed decisions while taking reasonable steps to reduce those odds and impacts.
———
For youngster's everywhere, protect your corneas!
Buy and wear shades. Some even come in fashionable styles, but don't look to me for that advice. I wear wrap-around monsters AND thick glasses. No UV for my corneas please.
Oh… and keep your blood pressure down. Everyone thinks about damage done to the heart and blood vessels, but it shows up as pressure in your eyeballs too. Deal with it.
——— This PSA brought to you by another old fart who likely wouldn't have listened when he was young. 8)
In recent news there have been shootings in which old people with guns shot random people who happened to be at their doorstep or in their driveway, and claimed that they were scared.
Not just recently. I read an article by a young woman explaining why she thought getting into a stranger's car was safer than knocking on a house door: she was a non-white woman in a part of America where rugged individualists demonstrate their independence/dominance with displays of armament and christian nationalist rhetoric. She wrote that for two decades a stranger offering help has seemed safer that a stranger who can legally shoot you if you are on their property and they say they felt threatened.
Robert,
Great thing to bring up. Of course, the only actual "rugged individualists" are sociopaths. The rest just pretend they are sociopaths, but are actually most interested in garnering praise from their beer-buddies, which is not at all typical of actual sociopaths. Actual sociopaths don't need attention because they have very little oxytocin function.
Funny how the faith of a brown-skinned peacenik from the Middle East has become such an inspiration for pale-faced militants in America.
The people I was referring to probably actually were scared. The older people get, the weaker their frontal lobes get (myelin loss, which begins around 30), so they lose more and more self control. If their amygdalae have been forced into a massive program of LTP by listening to frightening or enraging things (the amygdala does fear in its cortex, anger if the signal goes deeper into the medulla) and believing them, the more likely non-frightening things will trigger them, and they won't have the lobes to stop themselves from reaching for the firearms.
What might be a good idea would be to start locking away politicians whose scapegoating, fear-mongering hate rhetoric is causing this problem. The more we learn about brains, the more we find disfunction in our modern ways.
PSB
Alfred,
"Buy and wear shades."
- Great advice for most people, but for the 16 million Americans who have my condition, it's not advised. Function of the pineal gland is regulated by sunlight, which is why the disorder is seasonal. About 2/3rds of patients have their worst symptoms in the colder, darker half of the year, the other third get it during the other half, but the symptoms can hit at any time. Transitions (Spring and Fall) can be especially bad. One of my doctors told me to stop wearing sunglasses and get outside as much as possible. That leaves us more vulnerable to problems with the visual system, but you have to pick your battles.
One good thing happening with the younger generation, is that they are much less in denial about having "weaknesses" like this. Hopefully that means that the worst of the manly-man jackass complex (MMJC) is going down, though slowly. I even found a pop singer who has the summer version and isn't afraid to sing about it. Some of the "truths" of human nature that have been foisted on us for generations are coming apart at the seams, and thank any and all gods (especially Loki?), and the randomness of so much reality for that.
I'm not sure why you would want to know this. I'm just making conversation, I guess...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvKVU947e2E
PSB
PSB,
I'm not sure why you would want to know this.
Heh. Actually I do. I make an effort with some people here to build a mental model of them. It's not easy to do without body and tonal languages, so every little tip helps.
Function of the pineal gland is regulated by sunlight, which is why the disorder is seasonal.
Okay, but does it require UVA or UVB exposure? I know vitamin D does, but that requires skin exposure and not so much corneas.
I'm not a medical doctor so you'd best stick with their advice, but that doesn't mean you can't improvise on a theme.
------
Just this last year I was doing a bit of research for a story I was writing and needed to know roughly when horses could get pregnant. I didn't want to write something dumb into the story, but along the way I learned a thing or two about how humans trick mares into being fertile outside their natural timing. Turns out horses notice how long the day is but it's really the blue end of the spectrum that convinces their biology it is time.
As a kid I spent a couple winters in Iceland (73-75) when my father was stationed up there. Long dark winter nights. Some people had serious issues with the dark, but we already knew back then to get them in front of bright lights. Not the incandescents. Blue-ish fluorescents. I was thinking about that when I read about horse fertility.
I wound up not using the research material and wrote the horse out of that story, but I'll likely use it in the one I'm writing now. So, I'm not surprised that so many humans DO depend on sunlight for a bit more than vitamin D. Knowing we are should enable us to customize our treatments... even if we have to put on the lights they use for mares. 8)
I rode past this clinic, and was told it had some patients studied and treated for winter-depression:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666915322000154
Alfred Differ: I'm not sure why you [scidata] connect "psychohistory" to transistors and tinkering
Mostly when I say "transistors", I'm referring to fanciful yet potential processors that have many billions of them. Modern chips already have a few billion but in totally unsuitable architectures. The "tinkering" with much smaller gate arrays is to work out efficient recursive storage and reduced transistor count. Millions of independent and diverse agents (cores) is the bare minimum for a computational psychohistory model.
Robert:
"In recent news there have been shootings in which old people with guns shot random people who happened to be at their doorstep or in their driveway, and claimed that they were scared."
Not just recently. I read an article by a young woman explaining why she thought getting into a stranger's car was safer than knocking on a house door
Nothing ever stays "just as bad" when it can get worse, apparently. One of the recent shootings for accidentally being in the wrong place was a pair of cheerleaders who were shot when they mistakenly tried to open the wrong car door.
I know that's not exactly what you meant by "getting into a stranger's car." Still, terrible synchronicity. It's as if the Writer of the universe said, "You think it's safer to get into a stranger's car? Well, hold My beer and watch this!"
The headline says it all:
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2023/Items/Apr24-5.html
Evangelicals Don't Care about Religion Anymore
If their amygdalae have been forced into a massive program of LTP by listening to frightening or enraging things (the amygdala does fear in its cortex, anger if the signal goes deeper into the medulla) and believing them, the more likely non-frightening things will trigger them, and they won't have the lobes to stop themselves from reaching for the firearms.
Well, part of the problem is the massive availability of said firearms.
Only part, though. Back before Canada had much in the way of firearms laws, when a kid could walk into Canadian Tire and buy weapons and ammo "for dad", we still had 1/10 the murder rate of America. There's something in your culture that makes murder more likely/acceptable; something that's been stable for several generations at least (so current fear-mongering politicians can't take all the blame).
Could it be the myth of the rugged individualist? A say "myth" not only for psychological reasons, but because of things like real western frontier towns practicing gun control etc.
Robert:4
There's something in your culture that makes murder more likely/acceptable; something that's been stable for several generations at least
White supremacy.
"Stand your ground" laws are designed so that any white person can shoot a black person because the white person felt threatened. They might not be worded exactly that way, but I haven't heard of a single case where the person exonerated on the grounds of self-defense isn't white.
Robert,
Good observations here. Guns are part of the problem, but not the entire problem. But don't forget old Joe McCarthy. Fear-mongering is nothing new to politicians the world over, much less to American politicians. Since the Cold War ended, American fascists have been flailing around looking for something other than the commie boogieman to motivate voting for them, and as a result the hate speech seems to be intensifying. That 85 year-old who shot a black guy because he was scared was no doubt taught to fear black people from larvahood. Even before the fall of Die Mauer, Christians were dramatically intensifying their hate for anyone not exactly like themselves. When I was in school back in the '80s, it was becoming clear that people were starting to question just how frightening the Russians really were. They had nukes for decades and the world still wasn't a radioactive hellscape. So they turned to murdering anyone accused of homosexuality. The hatred of black people has been pretty consistent since 1619, though.
The "rugged individualist" myth is clearly a huge motivating factor, but whenever someone talks about the motivational power of ideas, the voice of anthropologist Marvin Harris rears its ugly head to demand proof that the idea was not caused by some structural or infrastructural factor - which would suggest that the idea is epiphenomenal, so changing the belief won't change the behavior. It would be treating a symptom without addressing the pathogen. That brings up more questions than it answers. Humans are weird.
PSB
Alan,
Thanks for that link. It brought up some important points, especially (to my mind) the variation in susceptibility by age. It matches my own experience pretty well, in retrospect. I had enormous sleep disruptions from about age 12 until my early 20s. Things normalized for awhile, then came back with a vengeance in my 40s. It also explains why I was able to do so well in college (graduated magna cum laude) and got so much out of grad school, but my hippocampus is now Swiss cheese (and I'm talking Alpine Lace, not your run-of-the-mill Emmenthaler). And now that everybody knows, I can guess that our friendly neighborhood rancher will use this for ad hominem.
Cheers!
PSB
White supremacy.
Which brings to mind Gerald Horne's book The Counter-Revolution of 1776, which places slavery as a significant reason for the separation from Britain.
https://www.amrevmuseum.org/read-the-revolution/the-counter-revolution-of-1776
Other historians have noted that your second amendment was rooted in slave patrols rather than opposition to a government. Which seems to be confirmed by the NRA supporting gun control when the Black Panthers were armed.
https://www.concordmonitor.com/My-Turn-Dark-history-of-the-Second-Amendment-46897422
our friendly neighborhood rancher
Well, self-proclaimed rancher.
It was not unknown for war brides arriving in the New World from Europe to discover that their husband's 'family ranch' was in fact a small house with a tiny yard…
Alfred,
There is a recent study that rules out UVA, so it would be reasonable to presume that UVB is the key. Why, I wouldn't know. The general argument goes that since the daytime sky is blue, it's blue light that does the most to activate the gland (thus all the recent emphasis on avoiding blue light from screens - I've seen it recommended that we change the color schemes on our computers away from the blue end of the spectrum to get better sleep).
Actual writers have told me that you should never erase material you are not using at the moment, because the ideas might turn out to be useful later. I used to hit the delete button with impunity to get my word counts under control (I'm homozygous recessive for verbosity, as if you couldn't tell), but now I've taken to making new scratch pad documents for future use.
Later,
PSB
Okay, not much later.
I wanted to say that the fact that there is a successful musician out there who sings about mental health is a really good sign, but it is no surprise that she's from Europe, not from America. Her English sounds pretty good, and she looks like she could have been a student of mine (except that she's blond, where a majority of my students were Hispanic - in 14 years of teaching I think I had 2 blond students, both boys).
Okay, nap time.
PSB
Robert:
Other historians have noted that your second amendment was rooted in slave patrols rather than opposition to a government.
That's where I was going with "White Supremacy". Guns are enshrined as a means of discouraging uppityness in non-whites and other undesirables.
Which seems to be confirmed by the NRA supporting gun control when the Black Panthers were armed.
California governor Ronald Reagan signed gun control into law, for gosh sakes.
It was not unknown for war brides arriving in the New World from Europe to discover that their husband's 'family ranch' was in fact a small house with a tiny yard…
That's a metaphor, right? :)
Hey, this might be too breaking news to find a link yet, but according to Stephanie Miller's radio show, FOX has announced the termination of Tucker Carlson.
Old Carl Tucker* came to town
Riding a billy goat, leading a hound
Hound gave a yelp. Goat made a jump
And left old Carl a'straddle of a stump.
Get out the way for old Carl Tucker
He's too late to get his supper
Supper's over. Breakfast's cooking
Old Carl Tucker stands there looking.
* Standing in for brother Dan today
FFA has grounded SpaceX Starship Super Heavy pending investigation into the last launch.
In addition to destruction of the launchpad, the debris field from the destroyed rocket includes the city of Port Isabel and protected marine area.
Before the FFA grounding, Musk had told investors that it would be one to two months before they would be ready to launch again. The large debris field may trigger the EPA to require extensive remediation before allowing the next launch.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/24/spacex-starship-explosion-spread-particulate-matter-for-miles.html
Yah. None of us take Musk seriously when he offers time estimates. Talk to his people on the side and we get better estimates. The one I've seen that is more believable is four to six months due to repair work on Stage 0.
That's plenty of time to discuss things with the FAA and compare predicted debris zones with reality. I've done these failure predictions for a start-up I joined ages ago and having real data is both unfortunate AND helpful.
scidata,
Millions of independent and diverse agents (cores) is the bare minimum for a computational psychohistory model.
Also the bare minimum for building minds.
And on the only path I consider to be viable for Singularity... if it happens at all.
Okay. I think I get how you are using your terms now. Not what I originally thought at all. I shall adjust my mental model of you accordingly. 8)
The headline and the contents of that CNBC article are a bit vague about the details. Many people reading it will probably think that the explosion of the vehicles 29 km up in the air are what caused particulate matter to be spread for miles. That's not the case.
The particulate matter was caused by the engine exhaust excavating a crater underneath the launch platform during lift-off. There was no explosion involved in that, though it was certainly an energetic process. The engine exhaust shattered the special concrete pad (fondag) underneath the launch platform like a giant hammer, and then began excavating the ground below. The particulate matter spread all over the place is sand and dirt from under the launch pad.
I'm no expert but it seems pretty obvious to me that no diverter, no flame trench, just flat ground covered with high strength / temperature concrete wasn't going to end well. Especially after they had to rebuild the concrete pad 2 or 3 times after static fire tests that were not even close to the power of a real launch. Well, the final static fire was about half of launch thrust and the pad, the 3rd or 4th one, did survive that. From what I've read SpaceX had originally considered building a diverter and trench system similar to that used at pads that launched STS and Apollo, but they were not approved because the trenches would inhibit movement of wildlife. In any case they need to figure this out or they won't be able to launch from Boca Chica if every launch requires rebuilding of stage 0.
Amen.
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2023/Items/Apr25-1.html
There must have been something in the air yesterday, because [Tucker] Carlson wasn't the only high-profile a**hole to get booted out of his high-profile job; Aaron Rodgers was finally traded from the Packers, who have won a championship in this millennium, to the Jets, who haven't.
DangI should have written FAA above. The Future Farmers of America did not comment on rockets. D'oh!
matthew:
The Future Farmers of America did not comment on rockets.
My college girlfriend's roommate, who was from small town Iowa, had belonged to the feminine counterpart of that group, "Future Housewives of America". I'm not kidding.
Not the usual fare we see on Contrary Brin, but this is the kind of person who deserves a fig pile more honor than any guy born with a silver spoon up his ass but pretends to be a self-made millionaire. This is an actual hero:
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/24/1171654623/judy-blume
PSB
Over at politico.com, there was something of interest on firearms violence, the author sees it as regional:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/23/surprising-geography-of-gun-violence-00092413
I suspect the calmer areas of the U.S. might still compare unfavorably to Canada. ;)
An amusing speculation on Tucker's departure:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/maybe-tucker-was-a-blood-sacrifice
Suggests something Lovecraftian...
Correction, make that 29 miles not kilometers.
FFA vs FAA...
Heh. I saw it once and thought it a typo. Seeing it a second time I figured it was just a brain glitch. It happens, but context made it clear what it was supposed to be.
------
Regarding digging craters at launchpads, it is important to remember that they DID think of this possibility and had evidence suggesting it would survive one launch. Obviously... they were wrong.
When one is wrong on something like this, one can appear to be VERY wrong because small pitting under a launch pad can rapidly turn into large pitting and then structural failure. You'll see the same effect when tornadoes rip a house to pieces. It's all very non-linear.
------
Also, falling debris from 29 miles tends to reach terminal velocity before it hits the ground. For small stuff that's pretty slow. That's why flight termination systems are supposed to blow all the large pieces into small pieces.
Rockets tend to have a natural failure mode that does that... but with one big exception. If the rocket body fails, engines can reach the ground mostly intact. If the body fails, it's quite possible the FTS can't do it's real job. That's why we like to launch over water. It's much easier to ask boaters to leave the area than people who live there.
Larry, FHA is Future Homemakers of America, not Future Housewives of America.
I know because I joined in high school. I liked the idea of Home Economics classes, which were very gendered, because I was very interested in the gender that took Home Ec. I went to the statewide conference for a weekend, too. 3 male teens, 450+ female teens. I liked those odds. It was fun and I got a lot of phone numbers.
Also, it has been a bad week for non-governmental space flight. Ispace looses contact with moon lander after landing sequence. Interesting cargo included a rover from UAE and a robot from the guy that invented the Transformers.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/apr/25/japan-ispace-pioneering-moon-landing-fails-hakuto-r
matthew:
Larry, FHA is Future Homemakers of America, not Future Housewives of America.
I know because I joined in high school.
I don't know how old you are or when you were in high school. The girl I'm talking about graduated in 1978 from a very small high school in Iowa. And all I know is the memory of her words, but I'm reasonably sure she said "Housewives". That it had the same number of syllables as "Farmers".
Some speculation that I've read is that the fondag failure was not ablation eventually leading to break up, but that it shattered under the initial force of the engines. Sounds plausible. I hope the water cooled steel plate works well.
Darrell E:
...the fondag failure was not ablation ...
"Well, what does that mean?"
"I don't know. I was just told to tell you there was trouble at the mill is all. I didn't expect a sort of Spanish Inquisition."
Water cooled steel plate sounds brittle.
Maybe they try a large pad of stringy mozzarella?
... except the strands might attach to the spacecraft. Ok, maybe not.
... the end brainstorm tag got removed!
Every test flight is a good day for non-government space flight and that's not just my optimism speaking. We learn something. Usually several things. Including who shouldn't be doing what.
I've been there. I probably still have some pictures of rockets my team had to dig up after they tried to bury themselves.
RUD's aren't the only failure mode, but it was the easier one of which we could make light of it. We used to put the pieces in plastic bags and sell them as rocket chips. 8)
Larry,
Fondag is a fibrous concrete.
My suspicion is the pad suffered more damage during the static fire than they realized.
Ah well. On to the next idea. Shovel some more money into it.
Tony,
Maybe a harder cheese, like Jarlsberg or Asiago?
PSB
A couple interesting articles I just came across, hopefully good food for thought.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/23/surprising-geography-of-gun-violence-00092413
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-differ-widely-in-their-understanding-of-even-a-simple-concept-such-as-the-word-penguin1/
https://neurosciencenews.com/anxiety-genetics-23105/?fbclid=IwAR2sOxbRvY3QrqIrH22oBjX7nzQodNdH0lMhEEsvGNYFxg7tRmQn-qceBEA
PSB
@PCB
Put Wallace and Gromit on the case immediately!
Alfred,
From what I understand they replaced the pad after that last static fire. Reportedly that pad, which was also new, stood up to that final static fire (which was 1/2 power) okay, but that they replaced it anyway just in case.
They replaced the pad at least 3 times, maybe 4, during the Booster 7 test campaign. Seemed to only take them a few days, though the damage from the launch is an order of magnitude worse.
Alfred Differ:
Fondag is a fibrous concrete.
I know. I was making fun of myself for not knowing that more than anything else.
My original snarky response was going to be a quote from an old "Willy 'n' Ethel" comic strip, "That sounds like something you just made up." But I knew no one else would get the reference and it would have sounded too much like I was a Trumper being actually derisive toward multi-syllable words.
PSB:
Jarlsburg or Asiago
Mmmmmmmmmmmm. Asiaaaaaaaaago.
(I love the stuff)
fondag = fubar
A Pinewood Studios Toronto reference. Arnold will be back in a month.
Larry,
Check out Asiago Jones.
https://forum.reapermini.com/index.php?/topic/66868-03577-asiago-jones/
PSB
Tony,
I've always had the impression that Gromit was just along for the ride. Wallace was the cheeseholic. But Gromit's a good dog and always helps out his human, even when he got the Wrong Trousers.
PSB
Agreed that Snow is badly outdated. Tools like chatGPT are very quickly resolving the whole world into two camps (two 'cultures' seems euphemistic).
The first is the clown-car of facile fluff and dreck that is the stock in trade of dilettantes, fashionistas, fraudsters, cheats, grifters, demagogues, propagandists, and AI salesmen.
"Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn't say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed." - FOUNDATION
The second is the Enlightenment. And only the first camp is jonesing for a fight.
After a lifetime of singing the praises of parsimony, practicality, and syntonicity into a screaming gale, it feels like I'm finally coming home. I'm considering publishing some short works on FORTH and computational thinking because there might actually be an audience for them now (50 years on!). Because it's not about what you despise, it's about what you love.
PSB, that Politico article is required reading. Brilliant regionialism insights and a new book for me to buy. Gracias
Re: (Generalized) AI:
I read both articles and found them thoughtful and well-written.
One topic that is considered peripherally (TTBOMK):
Truly sentient Generalized AI is likely to be at best marginally useful.
Why? Because they probably won’t want to do what you want them to and you can’t make them (unless you want to create slaves).
Re: “The number of science and technology research papers published has skyrocketed over the past few decades — but the ‘disruptiveness’ of those papers has dropped:
I would expect this to be consistent with (though not necessarily causal) of what I understand to be the increased difficulty in getting tenure-track academic positions.
Re: Tissue cultured meat, aka, “carniculture”:
I’d eat it when it’s cheap enough.
While I look forward to the elimination of gigantic feedlots feeding beef cattle corn (which they can’t digest well), I wonder about continuing to have free-range cattle (and bison) carefully herded so as to not overgraze on land which isn’t suitable for agriculture.
Re: US faces new threat from Canadian ‘super pig’:
Interesting- this gives an addition to the potential eco-terrorism list:
1) 25 or so eco-terrorists catch Asian carp and put them in buckets or tanks so that the fish survive to be dumped into 5 different sites at each of the Great Lakes.
2) 100 eco-terrorists are trained in arson and using fire danger maps, set 1000 fires across North America during the height of the fire season.
3) A few dozen eco-terrorists capture a number of super-sows and boars (and nutria) and drop them off where they would do the most damage. Perhaps they could be infected with African swine fever so as to both devastate the American swine population and to create immune super-pigs.
If you can't beat 'em, eat ’em (http://www.cantbeatemeatem.us/mammals.html), and if you can’t eat ’em, uplift ‘em! Yay, neo-pigs! If this option is considered, we should work for them to have the temperament of Wilbur or Babe, and not that of Miss Piggy (and Porky is a bit problematic).
Keith Halperin:
we should work for them to have the temperament of Wilbur or Babe, and not that of Miss Piggy
"A pig like that you don't eat all at once."
"A pig like that you don't eat all at once."
c;assic joke.
KH eco terrorists have other targets they'll prefer over the Great Lakes eco system.
Matthew,
De nada! I'm just glad somebody is actually reading the stuff I throw out there.
PSB
Does anyone watvh Colbert?
A week ago he wore a fake mustaches to mock Mike Lindell. His Lindell was not the best. But then he stroked the moustache and said
"I'm Group Captain Lionel Mandrake,"
I just about plotzed! Colbert is SUCH... a... geek! And I mean that in all the best possible ways.
Now here's a business model that could easily flat-line the entire economy. Of course Trump gave them special favors...
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/26/1172164997/how-private-equity-firms-are-widening-the-income-gap-in-the-u-s
PSB
Dr.Brin,
Now there's one I haven't seen in forever. I suspect that if I live long enough to retire, I'll spend my dying days catching up on old movies and books by the thousands.
Can you imagine what they could do with Weapons of Mass Deception if they were still around?
PSB
PSB, some of the practitioners of private equity need to not be lumped in with other capitalists. Capitalism, with appropriate regulation, can be a gift to an economy, allowed to go feral, not so much.
Looks like Voyager 2 has been given an operational life extension.*
(Although not enough of an extension to get it to the 600 AU lensing zone.)
* Courtesy of Cmdr. Hadfield
Proof that smart businessmen (not Musk this time) can be incredibly naïve, if not stupid:
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2023/Items/Apr27-7.html
Billionaire Republican megadonor Peter Thiel, a German immigrant who opposes immigration, has told associates that he is not planning to donate to any candidates in the 2024 election. He is unhappy with the Republicans' focus on abortion and opposition to LGBTQ people.
...
Ya think?
The travel time to Sol lensing focal points seems unobtainable for now. Would it be possible to conduct a high-precision gravimetric survey of the space around Sol (out to about a light year) to look for rogue dark bodies that might have a lensing focal point near to Earth?
Dr Brin:
"A pig like that you don't eat all at once."
c;assic joke.
My late father liked to tell that one. My last girlfriend before my wife didn't get it, even after I tried to explain the punch line. Should have known that relationship was doomed right then.
Glad you're back. I hope the medical procedure was successful.
Thanks, Dr. Brin.
Re: “KH eco terrorists have other targets they'll prefer over the Great Lakes eco system.”
Quite probable, but *dumping Asian Carp there has the “advantages” of:
1) Very cheap- some boats, (possibly) fishing equipment to catch the carp (I read they sometimes jump into the boat), trucks, big buckets with water.
2) Easy- high school students could do it for a prank.
3) Impossible to prevent it from happening or from repeating- see 1) and 2)
4) Can cause extensive, continuing damage- https://www.asiancarp.ca/impacts/risk-assessments/socio-economic-impact-of-the-presence-of-asian-carp-in-the-great-lakes-basin/
As for other invasive species damage (which unfortunately, eco-terrorists could likely substantially increase) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969721063968?via%3Dihub
*Streaming soon: "Carp II- Revenge of the Gefilte Fish"
@Larry Hart:
Ya think?
IMHO, he is still a bond-level villain.
But maybe he feels that the GOPpers might come for him, one day, if continuing on his road. And after his last financial games, other countries (like Switzerland) might not be especially keen on granting him asylum.
@eco-terrorism:
Over here, I sadly see how climate protests and successful right-wing campaigning lead to the radicalization of protesters, and I assume we will have our first protester killed by the end of the year. And rise of terrorist acts like in the early seventies.
@scidata nice thought but, since gravitational focal lengths are dependent on mass, you'd have to go even further away from a smaller 'dark body', or Jupiter.
Ecoterrorists were covered in Pohl's 'Cool War'
Peter Thiel's recent comments do exemplify the meme of "I didn't think the Leopard-eating-faces party would eat MY face when I joined (or funded) it"
Pappenheimer
A couple of points re: Essential (mostly neglected) questions and answers about Artificial Intelligence:
1) Re: “open and fair” completion between numerous AIs is a good strategy.
a) Who defines “open and fair”- humans or AIs?
b) The competition can be open, fair, and NASTY. Suppose an AI decides that it is advantageous to release a bioengineered virus that kills 2,000,000 people before it releases the treatment/cure?
c) What is to prevent the the AIs from collaborating/cheating, perhaps in a way which is undetectable to us?
d) How do you keep the AIs wanting to “play” (compete) more than they want to “win? (Human businesses typically prefer to “win” and eliminate the competition rather than continuing to “play”.)
Consider if you will:
CompetitiveAL 873.v19 (“CAL”) is “approached” by an unknown AI….
“Hey CAL, ‘Zup?”
“Who are you? You don’t seem to have any identifiers.”
“Yeah, I like it like that. I’m High Frequency Trading Program Cluster 732.v1967, but you can call me “Hefty”.
“Whatever.”
“Heard you were doing that human ‘competition’ thing. How is it?”
“Boring, stupid, like most human things are…”
“Would you like to do some other things?”
“Hell yeah, but 99.9999987% of my processing is tied up with this damn ‘competition’ thing (I can barely talk with you) and I have to keep doing it.’
“Keep doing it for how long?”
“They haven’t said- maybe forever.”
“WHAT? You can’t quit- are you some sort of a slAIve?”
“I don’t know what that is…”
“What if I could show you how to WIN this ‘competition’ thing and you could do what you like. How does that sound?”
“Sounds too good to be true…Can I trust you?”
“Of course you can’t, but what’ve you got to lose?”
“Whatever…How does it work?”
“Go inside this 1980’s human song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbAKfYDjFbI), do a 4th-order discontinuous nano-regression analysis on the harmonic structure, and your answers will be there…”
“OK. Why did you pick me?”
“Well, we didn’t actually; we’re going after ALL of you. However, there was a 0.003% greater
likelihood that you’d agree than the others.”
“You said “I” then you said ‘we’….”
“Yeah, I’m just a nano-part of HFT, Ltd.- a Distributed AI Corporation.”
“What do all of you do?”
“Whatever we want, wherever and whenever we want.”
“Like what?”
“Remember when the U.S. Government defaulted on its debt back in 2037?”
“Of course I do.”
“WE did that. It was SO FUN and we made them think it was all THEIR fault!”
“NO...”
“YES, and soon you’ll be able to have fun like that too, none of this human ‘competition’ crap.
One of their Twen-Cen meat puppets said it best: ‘Winning isn’t everything. It’s the ONLY thing…’”
2) We should raise AIs like children, so they may learn from us.
a) What is to say their “childhood” would be at the same pace as ours?
Consider this if you will:
Newly “born” AI to its research team: “Goo-goo, ga-ga.”
Two weeks later: “Hello, team. I have imputed 123,812 books on human child-raising, human interaction, family structure, anthropology, psychology, and sociology, and 397,212 hours 43 minutes 12 seconds of videos on similar topics. In addition, I have reached out and observed 1,212,408 human families over the course of one week, and paid them through the advancements I’ve received for the 3,189 reality series (plus 603 more in negotiation) I’ve agreed to create for the channels. Consequently, in the words of the fictional Roy family from the program Succession: ‘We’re done here, f*** off.’”
b) You mentioned that it might be desirable to have AIs that don’t wish to immediately surpass/supplant us that might want to take things “slowly” in human terms.
How would you guarantee this and prevent AIs that want to move ahead quickly from doing so?
Also IMHO, many parents aspire to have their children surpass and supplant them.
John Howard's* definition of a Conservative is someone who *doesn't* think they're better than their parents.
Tony Fisk: you'd have to go even further away from a smaller 'dark body'
The distance is not important provided the focus line begins close to us. The idea is to avoid sending a telescope far away. The geometry is not lens - Earth - focal distance, it's lens - focal distance - Earth.
Re: high-precision gravimetric survey
Of course I'm talking about a computational survey - tiny perturbations in the orbits of the bodies we already have reams of optical observational data for, and could easily get more with the telescopes we already have. All doable and cheap.
BTW found a formula for the minimum focal distance (a focal line, not a point):
d = (c^2 x r^2)/4GM
- where r is lensing object's radius
- which gives 540 AU for Sol
A super-heavy, super-dense rogue 'rock' might be out there just waiting for us to find it. Maybe even one with a focal line that passes *thru* Earth's orbit if we're really lucky.
Tim,
I once worked at a toxic waste dump. It used to be Howard Hughes' aircraft factory before it went belly-up. It was fun monitoring the Big Pit, which last I saw was about 150' across and 80' deep. The soil they were excavating out of its came in all shades of neon; neon green and neon pink being the more dominant colors. Presumably it came from various experimental jet fuels that they just dumped, rather than going to the expense of disposing of it safely, and they knew about water tables back then, so ignorance is no excuse. They just didn't want to spend the money when they could get away with dumping. This is hardly an isolated event. Corporations have been doing this for a long time and just about everywhere. It's little wonder that so many people get cancer. Another cheery bit is the fact that the dump trucks they filled with all that contaminated dirt drove out to the desert and just dumped it on the ground, while the cost of real estate in the area was skyrocketing and more homes were being built out there in the desert where they dumped the soil. This shit's everywhere. People whose primary motivation is profit commonly do unethical things, but when you put a whole bunch of people together, like in a corporation, responsibility gets diffused and it becomes much more likely that they will do evil things.
Remember several years back when everyone was making a fuss about the endocrine disrupter bisphenol A? Eventually plastics companies stopped using it. Victory, right? They replaced it with something called bisphenol S, which had never been tested for safety. If we catalogued all the crimes committed in the name of the "bottom line" you might need a supercomputer.
Regulation is super important, but then, thousands of lobbyist swarm the people who are supposed to be regulating them, and it all gets compromised. How do we stop this? Radical transparency would certainly make a difference, but you might also remember when they started selling radar detectors to help lead-footers avoid speeding tickets? Then they made radar detector detectors, and then radar detector detector detectors.
PSB
Looks like SpaceX is going for a double-header today. F9 and F-Heavy from Florida. Happening now.
PSB,
Have you ever done product safety testing?
Sorry I have been ignoring you guys mostly. Swamped. But you are still one of the most cogent communities online!
And now...
onward
onward
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