Manglano

I actually don't doubt the Daily Mail about this particular story. Mining abuses in Africa include some of the worst crimes committed by Western civilization (vide: the concept of "Western Civilization" may be outdated), over things some of us in technology would consider essentially valueless today.

Chocolate is almost as serious a concern as cobalt and diamond. The legacy of colonialism created a food and infrastructure vacuum in Africa which is typically filled by mineral extraction and labor exploitation.

Cryogenic engines burn hydrogen from electrolysis and their fuel can be produced from renewable resources. All their atmospheric fuel is returned to the ocean by the water cycle, so little fuel is lost to the vacuum. Engine tuning limits greenhouse emissions. Magnetic projectiles can reach escape velocity with the right design.

Instead of one giant rocket, imagine swarms of small, reusable, low-emission projectiles whose payloads assemble into larger apparatuses in space.

Pneumatic cars.

I think the point is that sufficiently-advanced economies manifest bizarre micro-economies, but that these aren't necessarily earth-shattering. Like, Etherium Cats might be the 21st century Dutch tulips, but perhaps nations don't rise and fall on the values of "delicacies."

Too many variables. I would say, grow the most-energy dense, least land & water intensive crops possible. For the US my understanding is that that would probably entail GM corn, tepiary beans, and squash, on rotation or with companion planting, no till, dryland farming as much as possible.

But then there are economies of luxury and scale, people like fruit, and meat, and spices, and stuff which can't be grown nearby. People cultivate the jackfruit instead of maize, Brazil's trying to extirpate a "jackfruit infestation," and olive trees are sometimes considered "weeds" in Australia.

The Neolithic Revolution is bonkers, basically.

I'm not an experienced farmer, everyone's land is different, and just today I learned that there are parts of the world where bushland edibles are so plentiful that the locals see no reason to farm at all. So perhaps I should shut up now :)

Yes, it is so. Consider that corn was modified to be more resilient but its pollen may be compatible with nearby plants. Hybridization of transgenics with local flora may have unintended and far-reaching consequences. That's why the "Terminator" traits are typically outlawed. No one (eh...citation needed) desires a world where growing the food requires a proprietary compound. I doubt a civilization with a food supply like that could remain stable.

However! I read an interesting study that claimed Bt transgenics are better for food production & the environment because they kill crop pests but the carnivorous field fauna (spiders, horseflies, etc.) flourish with humankind's helping hand.

Whereas I typically purchase non-GMO foods, this revelation caused me to question, and to become ambivalent. No doubt pests would tolerate Bt with time, but in humans Bt is a non-toxic pesticide, and the germlines of the crop pests would probably never recover from the trait's proliferation. At the same time, the carnivorous "worker arthropods" which eat the crop pests would also experience a huge acceleration in their development.

Directed breeding in animals is an issue which has a tighter grip on my heart--some of the stuff that's been done to dogs and cats to "get them to look a certain way" is really messed up. Maybe some look at the fields the same way.

I do not know. It is not my choice. I am glad for that.

when you think about it, it's a bad simulacrum of the social encounter and experience. i use mine as a blog for issues and feelings that have provoked a big response in me but it's far from ideal

Okay!

Downvote me if you like but our fuel mix in this country is still ~40% combustion and the calculations on wind power say that at current power requirements civilization will harvest enough energy from the air currents to change the climate again. Maybe it stops hurricanes, I have no idea.

Also, steel, like atomic fuel, is toxic to produce and reprocess!

I know it is much-despised by but I am curious as to the lifetime energy footprint of a fission reactor facility with onsite fuel-reprocessing and waste transmutation. And then? Tokamak. Won't even need a turbine!!

Parts of that system don't even exist yet but me I believe one day there will be clean atoms, fission or fusion, and they will require even less energy to produce and maintain than the wind and solar grid.

But then, I have lived among the fission reactors my entire life. Perhaps I am "mad from the rads" ;)

Bear in mind that electricity has only been around as a resource for a little while, and civilization will necessarily reorganize to use less and less of it as time continues.

To some extent we are radioactive material on the surface streets of the major cities, because we have consumed soil!! Even our steel tools can be somewhat radioactive, refinement concentrates point sources.

However, containment vessels like that are usually for refined ores, which end up in reactors, smoke detectors, medical devices, radiotherapy machines, you name it. Too expensive and possibly hazardous to airlift.

As far as I know, production of atomic weapons has stopped in this country and we're not even sure if they still work (half-lives--they rot). Could've been materiel for a stewardship program at the Hanford Site, or waste being evacuated from the Hanford Site.

Generally speaking, the remaining atoms transported and transmuted are for peace. That's why Russia brokers Uranium to the States, and why people in Kazakhstan and elsewhere continue to mine fissile ore.

If you were to shut down the remaining fission plants of Planet Earth, civilization as we know it, would end almost immediately, such is our need for these fuels. It would not be pretty--consider the amount of electric heat, the number of electric stoves with 50+ year duty lifetimes. That's why Japan recycles spent fuel at the French reactor.

US production has resumed, according to Wikipedia, as Cobalt 60 is coproduced and useful for medical sterilization.

As an aside: There are some people who are very skeptical of both atoms and space exploration. I'm not sure what their motives are but given the amount of steel necessary to produce wind turbines, I'm unconvinced that "renewable" is actually "greener."

There's some work being done in superfluid discovery which would create the sort of conditions you're looking for but physics discoveries move incredibly slowly and some of the materials are rare or difficult to create. However, that sort of "lubricate, seal, and forget" kinetic system is essential for a lot of surface work in space. Increasingly important on Earth as well.

As a heuristic, the less mechanical parts in any system, the more efficient it is over time.

Ideally, everything that's built is engineered like a spacecraft, because to some extent it is, and is onboard one.

Even something as simple as being able to have a clerk fill my jar with a weight of instant coffee would cut down my recycling mass by an average of about 50g per week and eliminate some plastic. Glass doesn't have a limit on recycle phases if handled correctly but all plastic other than PLA has a pretty short recycle lifetime.

They're probably reaching road vehicle bandwidth saturation, which is affecting drivers and warehouse workers downstream of the web interface. Refactoring their supply model for depots and reallocating staff to the depots.

Y'know, the Amazon General Store.

I feel like if the work isn't immediately like, "This is a product I myself see an immediate use and a need for," I'll have difficulty working on it.

On the other hand, if the product's like, "This is approximately something I've wanted to work on literally my entire life," my 9-5 is going to be a steady output stream of concise, quality code, with the languages and frameworks of my employer's choice.

My 6-8 is usually arts. I think engineering is art, it's just art whose language is mathematics. A lot of people disagree, but I purchased a GE NE-42 neon bulb and it's good evidence for my theory.

This study seems to be asking, "What makes a great Microsoft software engineer," given their sample cohort.

At least, properly separated, it degrades and can be reprocessed into more paper and cardboard. The US exports CRT televisions and chipsets for electronics with such minimal production quality as to be considered destined-for-disposal.

In some regions, pirated materials derived from metals, petrochemicals, and advanced dyes are immediately destroyed and shoveled into landfills: http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/steam-rollers-c...

The brown paper bag and the Anchor Hocking jar are going to come back in a big way...

The almost-invisible consumer habits of the past 100 years circumscribe virtually all of the greatest environmental disasters of the next 100, bearing in mind that "environmental disaster" has only existed since the steam engine or the logging of the Old Growth forests, depending upon where your measure of advanced development begins.

When you visit a grocery store, there's a garbage dump wrapped around most of the products. Some of it's biodegradable, compostable, and recyclable, much of it isn't. We can remediate and save some of these processes and luxuries, but that they are mostly unsustainable is evident to anyone who comprehends industrial engineering.

Tarski's undefinability theorem.

Math is a language for describing anthropic systems and perceptions. The brain is neither an anthropic system nor a perception, per se. So naturally, attempting to quantify it would select for eccentricities at either pole.

Researchers say that "superior IQ" also correlates with lower-income and higher achievement, but greater happiness. The question of what IQ actually signifies is a good one.

Maybe we should create some more competing metrics to study...Who knows what the data will find?

Humbly I disagree!

The labor of manufacture is perhaps why the fiat currency has value. This argument heads toward philosophy, but without the minting process (and its technological backbone), to some degree the dollar would be valueless cotton.

In nations where the fiat currency is printed on polymer, I feel that their fiat currency states something like, "Not only do we stand as the people of this nation and its currency, but our belief is such that we have printed the currency with a specialized ink on an advanced polymer."

Before you consider military or government or the world outlook, a belief like that is not worth nothing. That note has indeed been backed by something, and no way is it Monopoly money!

Yes, I know that. I lump the US military under "network trust."

Gold in industrial applications will probably be used at atomic-scale in integrated manufacturing processes sometime within the next three years.

If you look at an ATX motherboard from 2009 with an Intel processor and a MacBook Pro mainboard from 2017, the amount of material consumption to create a similar product has fallen dramatically. You can actually see Moore's Law, it's kinda beautiful.

From an economic standpoint, Bitcoin is backed by generated electricity, computer hardware, and network trust. This is not dissimilar from the American Dollar, currently backed by the global energy economy and network trust. Here, the network is the US Treasury and the American public, depending on your analysis; Bitcoin's network is necessarily smaller but the opening of Futures trading suggests a vested interest in continued network growth by exchange operators. Consider the hedge on continued access to electricity and advanced technologies.

What this is worth to the consumer (is currency a product? opinions vary) will vary, but diamonds without industrial use were valued at billions of dollars only 150 years ago. Large diamonds still carry multimillion dollar values, despite that a 32-karat diamond can be grown from carbon ash in a small plasma cell for only hundreds of dollars. Maybe even less if the laboratory is powered with a renewable energy source.

The diamond was perhaps my favorite currency to study. It is an object historically backed partially by human fascination with light, partially by industrial demand, but the industrial demand was slowly diminished by the introduction of synthetic grit and stones. Despite the low cost of manufacturing a synthetic diamond for jewelry, they usually depreciate immediately--that may be a comment on the consumer's demand by those who practice valuation, or it may be that a "used" diamond is somehow worth less than a "newly discovered or grown" diamond. Impossible to say.

Good talking to you!

This was published in 2014. I discovered it earlier this evening. I'm not sure, but I think it implies that laser manipulation of any form of matter is not only possible, but possible at macroscopic distances. Really fun read!

I hear a lot about kids being kids, and adults being "childish." By the time I was ten, I could read Michael Crichton and Frank Herbert, and although I wasn't a mathematical wiz, I did have an innate understanding of the scientific method.

I'm of the mind that children have a precocial learning intelligence similar in rank and power to the adult mind--that is, the moment a child is born, they begin to absorb and construct knowledge about the world, with the only difference to the adult mind being that adults have more context for their "world theory"--and that it's the duty of the public to acknowledge and foster this.

When I consider that some people talk to children with "baby talk," I wonder how many people have been hurt by `keeping parrots with chickens` (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrot#Intelligence_and_learni...) so to speak. It's a controversial theory that might garner criticism, but that may be a failing--children can hear voices in the womb before they're born, talking to them in infancy as if they can't understand their mother's language is, at first, disrespectful, and later, possibly inhibits their development.

Young adults leave high school unable to do their own taxes, unknowing of what laws are, with no usable skills in any industry.

Exactly so. There are some who glide into the industries in our school systems but it may be that either they are "truly exceptional," were under the tutelage of a knowledgeable adult who could steer them towards certain success, or lucked into happiness.

You may also consider social stratification around Ivy Leagues and Public Research Universities as a side-effect of a lack of a Useful School. People cannot rely upon the reputation of a school and instead resort to a set of predatory heuristics about tuition and the age of the institution.

In a world where the public school system prepares, by grade 12, a legally-literate scholar with a set of vocational skills, the University (It helps to think of it as One University, from which emanates the total knowledge of humankind) assumes a role of governance over the high schools (colleges) and grade schools, which are the true preparatory apparatus of the adult mind.

The degeneracy of a given allele is relative to the phenotype of the organism and also the organism's environment. Sickle-cell confers survival advantage in environments where malaria is endemic, but is considered a degenerate allele in environments without malaria.

Also, there's an array of environmentally-determined switches and gene-determined proteins which are being changed concurrently by a team with whom you cannot communicate. Also the previous team which worked on all patches had several billion years and the specification was exacting.

Like trying to make a pretty patch on modular synth with access to only one module. This may be a bad idea.

Good speculative fiction story: Extraterrestrial species of immortal primates visits Earth, deploys the substrate for Wernicke & Broca's areas into a species of speechless apes, to see the invention of Shakespeare.