cerealbad

There is an informative interview with Linus Pauling on youtube from 1990 in which he discusses his life and scientific work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8maetlPd8Q

Anyone with a passing interest in this or adjacent fields should check out the Deep Carbon Observatory website.

https://deepcarbon.net/worlds-oldest-groundwater-supports-li...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfate-reducing_microorganism...

Demography of England:

  1348 4,810,000 +16.7%

  1351 2,600,000 −45.9%

  1650 5,310,000 +29.2%

very little of a writer survives with time; asimov had interesting world building but his characters are a little flat. the surviving great works of literature deal with human beings rather than the world they find themselves in. there is also the problem today of new authors breaking through and having to compete with a giant cannon of golden age sci fi or fantasy, and it can be overwhelming. if you read genre fiction, you could continue to do so for another 20 years and never leave the 20th century. there is a similar problem in literature, but there you get a lot more adventurous readers and experimental writers so novelty is sought out.

the general problem is a massive bloat of amassed and received works. record keeping is almost exhaustive so new books, movies, shows and songs just keep piling up, and the immensity of choices is overwhelming. i wonder how many people are subscribed to dozens of channels on youtube but just never find the time to catch up with more than 2 or 3 videos a day, and their backlog just keep growing and growing.... overcommunication and data creep. i can see a near future where the virtual you goes off and tests entertainment products then comes back and offers recommendations. in a primitive way this is already happening it's just past-you helping make selections for present-you.

it reminds me towards the end of the middle ages, when chroniclers amassed hundreds of manuscripts and began creating world history by condensing it down into something readable and understandable. maybe the essence of the age we live in is that of the neo-chronicler, tools that will reconnect people with the passage of time.

in a multipolar world you might see precise attacks during periods of tension targeting military facilities - base trade conflict. this minimizes loss of life and it creates a real sellers market for turnkey anti-missile solutions. the regional hegemon (china, russia, usa) can build their anti-antimissile hypersonic weapons to keep their edge while smaller countries in those regions develop accurate missile guidance and missile defence. this is a type of lukewarm war which is good for everyone, doesn't disrupt trade and can be used to justify military spending in a time of relative peace. after all the point of war is to win your opponents resources, nuclear weapons make nuclear war pointless. small tactical nukes might still be useful to have as a final deterrent against all out ground invasion, but the superpowers are unlikely to allow any new nuclear development.

Lockheed makes a mobile system called THAAD. I doubt there were any deployed in Iraq, and the effectiveness of these are dubious. The Russians put the S400 in Syria and it has performed well enough. These act more like a deterrent than an actual viable defensive grid.

radiation spreads and matter clumps. in this universe matter was allowed to form but radiation dominates. island chains swallowed up by a rising ocean.

Management bloating faster than the codebase.

The meta-position that you can absorb multiple world views and hold them temporarily to assess their ontological narrative is ridiculous. It bleeds from the stone of Christian reformation theology and the rationalist enlightenment chisel chipping away at it for centuries to increase the flow. What has been en vogue for the past 100 years is to fuse east and west in order to sell universality without the baggage of the past to the largely indifferent emergent empires in the Eurasian continental landmass.

Morris is a propagandist, whitewashing colonial-imperialism for the sake of posterity and progeny. Call it the bigotry of low time preference towards civilizations, call it misguided mystic zionism compounded by centuries of guilt of identity and millennial discrimination, call it international capital. The American founders understood that use of power is the trap of all great power and worked to curtail the accumulation of it by maintaining the settler ethos in the American mind. Now it has been replaced by 'a nation of immigrants'.

With Asia we see the fraying of the American ideals, betrayed and exposed as an empty power grab at cultural hegemony, a molten liquid setting into a misshapen lump, waiting to be squeezed, chipped and remelted again. A world war will be necessarily fought over this anti-human humanist idea, since people are not liquid and can only be squeezed so hard before they crack and splinter.

21st century American can only be reasoned with from an equal position of power, and the madness that spreads top down from the entrenched political apparatus is fanatical in its devotion to self-serving narratives, which will lead to more and more erratic and unpredictable outcomes, until corruption and despotism rule the day.

China has always dealt with ideological theocracies with subversion and reasoned pragmatism, it survived the mongols and the japanese and it will survive the americans too. what survives of the extended western roman empire? likely the political monuments of worship too large to tear down and a few choice words of english.

regional hegemons enforce embargoes on nations which refuse to behave according to new standards. a carbon non-proliferation treaty backed with coordinated blockades and cyber-attacks of critical infrastructure, initiating limited civil wars. the top level view is mutual cooperation to avoid global catastrophe.

this would require america and russia to stop selling their terrestrial missile technology and fossil fuels to the rest of world. once the current generation of inventory and raw energy is cleared it, orbital space based weapons can be deployed, obsolescing land and sea nuclear delivery and defense. this might explain china and india's rush to space, in order to have a bargaining chip in the future discussion about their territorial and energy sovereignty it is necessary for them to have a significant presence in low earth orbit.

things typically don't escalate dramatically during international disputes, and it's likely that the russians and americans will just use blackmail diplomacy to freeze, then develop the rest of the world with new energy they control. in order to avoid public scrutiny it's important to paint this as a critical emergency rather than a strategic sharing of influence between continental superpowers.

i suspect this will play out slowly over the next century, all the while regular people will be cowed by the ever looming threat of total extinction. not a very original sequel, a real throwback your parents might enjoy, cold war 2: fight the heat. the science on anything hardly matters, since scientific truth is subservient to pragmatism and political realities. given the massive investment in government information collection, it is clear that any large popular movement would quickly be steered towards desired policy goals, which should reinforce some version of the above story i laid out.

specific languages are the result of history and territory. Language is an innate human capacity. the speed, breadth and depth of acquisition is measured relative to other humans. less methodical than athletics, art, music or mathematics- which are easier to measure. but definitely not as nebulous as influence, attraction, art or leadership- which are just now becoming measurable with proto artificial brains.

human biology adapts to the environment and forms the basic primitive culture. technology for over 10,000 years rapidly mixed cultures and to a lesser extent biologies forming: languages, empires, religions, and ages. the technological process is far more efficient at shaping our cognition than the slower evolutionary one which works through intergenerational selection events. this is a cumulative runaway event which makes sense- given that human intellect is probably a bad mutation for long term fitness and survival, as humans wiped out all of the other humanlike species (and dangerous megafauna) which might have kept us in some ecological niche like the other animals. all living things head towards extinction, but our strategy is to burn up rather than fade away.

Allegedly Rent seeking billionaires are hypothetically positioning themselves in the supposed space race because the theoretical American -Chinese cold war will be potentially fought in low earth orbit, "smart money gets in quick to suckle at the trillion dollar defense budget." some people might say. Edit: opinion duly corrected in line with moderation standards

people are self-interested not truth interested. most scientific fields are initiated by a small handful of geniuses, but over time become a type of cloistered bureaucracy. your standard university education teaches you there are two paths - you make significant contributions and are remembered long after you die, or you plug in as a fresh node into the existing structure and are rewarded with a comfortable life, just check your ethics at the door.

this is largely due to the failure of idealism as a philosophical framework to set up any type of enduring political, economic or secular social structure. the blame lies on hegel or perhaps marx's interpretation of hegel getting stuck in praxis quagmires. which is why the turn towards asia and the new age movement which emerges from it in the early 1900s is essentially anti-science. the spiritual successor of communism is the idea of fusing the east and west traditions to form the new enlightened human, who sees no race, religion or gender but simply behaves as the universal light and creator. it has largely been a failure, as folding china into the world community has been against the pragmatic self-interest of various sensitive american industries - weapons, space, communication, high finance, which can exert sufficient power on the american leadership structures to avoid any type of idealism about world peace. there are no more enemies or allies just competitive co-morbidity, actors fraying the ropes they are tugging on until something breaks, like the ussr in the 80s.

it's only a problem if you think humans are equal. if you shift the view that humans are unequal and life is deeply unfair, then it's normal to see the next 100 years as a struggle for dominance between superstition and science, between a world led by north america or eurasia, between the new dominoes of fascist nationalism and disinterested international capitalism. it's a hot peace, which will end up with one temporary victor, possibly colonizing mars - or just landing there and coming back, before a new power emerges to challenge the old empire. i would argue that this is a bi-product of the 'correct' interpretation of hegel, the one that isn't taught directly in schools, the master and slave dialectic.

It's a continuation of the pivot to Asia strategy dating back to Clinton. The Middle East was a sandbox for testing new weapons for the next cold war century. Remember in American foreign policy the two parties are indistinguishable.

there's content creation - which seems to be reducing in length of time. (tiktok is just a vine reboot).

and content curation - which is about maximizing viewer-curator interaction (websites like twitch where an intimate experience can be created between one streamer and an audience numbering in the tens of thousands) through chat-streamer and chat-chat feedback loops and the democratic curation of of content on other platforms being re-broadcast and experienced in that shared environment. the most successful streamers are on for 6 to 12 hours a day, every day, and they essentially play the role of friend-babysitter-curator-community leader. often the 'content' being curated is pseudo-creator content, broadcasting walking through a city, videogames being played or scripted podcast/talent shows, but the niche of shared watching is growing. both re-watching of other short content created on the same platform, and long-form shared watching of sponsored documentaries, viewer donated video clips and even loops of watching others watching others. a type of 'best of the internet today' interactive and in real time.

this tracks the emergence of reality internet, where it becomes impossible to distinguish between an online and offline person, as online time increases. very similar to what andy kaufman was doing, tangentially related to the society of the spectacle and neil postman's critique of modern technology becoming a prison; fatalistic soliloquy on the doomed nature of mankind, trapped in self-reflection about nothing.

the outside becomes another experience on the inside of a screen. the internet is an extremely potent example of an old type of addiction, the 'information drug'. i often find myself listening to things online between 3x and 4x speed, the spread of information has greatly reduced the depth and quality, i might spend 20 minutes researching an the editorial board and journalist of a news piece after a brief 10-20 second glance over the actual piece. heavy users might be the first to see the fraying edges of the future to come. confusion, apathy, opportunistic tyranny to fill the void.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S051A8doXP0 (mind control)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m6dldvNECI (heart attack gun)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVF8YGFcJWU (electronic weapons)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT9-Z_p84b0 (active denial system)

it's not hard to find out since it's all public domain. the discovery is a trivial search away, and there are a lot of threads you can start pulling on which eventually leads to to books written by pseudo-credible people with some alphabet intelligence agency background.

here's the catch, verification is nearly impossible. what is a prototype, what is in production, what is just a rough sketch idea of something that was never implemented, what is wild fantasy. in the game of secrecy and asymmetric information, it pays to be deceptive and ambiguous. to the point most of the people publicly discussing these topics are they themselves compromised and largely act as misdirection.

you are not need to know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GY6fb59XFbQ (The Net 2003)

Mirage Men.

Interest rate cuts by the BoE, the pound weakens, Asian foreign investment - Japan and China would love to build high speed rail for an international market. Companies like Huawei will offer turn key solutions to government infrastructure projects. You can hedge by buying Swiss francs, Aussie dollars or Japanese Yen. Or purchasing an investment property or a plot of land for future development, immigration from Asia will see a rising demand in housing, cheap accommodation. Long term the UK becomes a type of Hong Kong for wealthy Europeans - tax haven and pivot point of entry into the European market. More jobs will be created in tech, manufacturing and construction.

That's a new way to spell oligarchy, or do ladders on mountains roll from the bottom up? Articles like this spell out a painful economic correction of overheated speculation, add that to EU tensions the eventual Yuan float and the standard 4 year political blackmail play being rolled out again to hedge against hyperfinancialization. Irresponsible and jaded advertising to keep the lights on, preying on the naive, miseducated and historically blind public. If you like this guys mountain he might sell you his bridge to get across.

a lot of people would lose income if the climate stopped changing.

america needs to elect another straight shooter so people don't get confused about foreign policy issues.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qdvm6h8WKg

i did mean the ocean originally, you have heat sponges which sit near the surface and use the gradient between air flowing above the surface, the hotter temperature above, and the cooler temperature of the ocean. the sponges can use the heat to move or they can trap it like charging a battery so you transform heat into kinetic or chemical energy. it occurred to me that a third way is to build a ring that uses the heat exchange between the layers of the atmosphere and space, using the same ectothermic biological principle.

talking about the earth as a system here is a bit of a misnomer. the core up to the mantle is very hot, but that heat only escapes to the surface through lava tubes/vents because the tectonic plates are good insulators. im specifically talking about the part of the earth we care about affecting the temperature of - and you can do this by shifting the heat up, down, storing it or converting it. the atmosphere is more permissive than the hydrosphere, hadal zone or crust.

it's easier to imagine the earth as a ball and things leaving the surface as exiting the ball system. but really when we talk about the earth it's more like a layer on a ball, and if you go deep into the ocean, underground or exit the atmosphere it's all the same type of thing.

as far as i know the climate cycles are a surface feature of the planet, deep underground is more inaccessible to our technology than reaching another star system.

the term is called geosequestration.

the mechanism that generates heat is reversible, that's how we got fossil fuels to begin with (hydrocarbon storage). if you think converting heat flux into electrical or mechanical energy doesn't reduce the total heat flux of the system then it's a perpetual motion engine? you get more energy out than you put in? think it through.

it's powered by a heat differential, you are draining the heat from the system and storing it or dissipating it under motion - reducing the overall flux - over time by cooling the hot side and heating the cool side eventually some equilibrium is reached, depending on how efficient the throughput is and how much heat you have, you then exhaust your temperature gradient and need to move somewhere hotter or colder.

one of us is very confused here. i claim "you can reduce heat locally in the earth system", and give examples: capturing and insulating it (trees, plants), converting it into other types of energy (genetically modified sea sponge/robots), as well as venting it into space through an atmospheric/orbital seebeck ring.

im not breaking any laws of thermodynamics, i am turning the planet into a refrigerator.

edit: to clarify i am claiming it's possible to move heat away from the habitable thin boundary layer by conversion: storage, mechanical use or venting.

a seebeck generator can exploit airflow above or depth below oceans to convert heat into electricity. what uniform heat? all human heat effects augment the existing temperature cycles which have baked in gradients. thermoelectric processes simply reverse this, it would cause a lot of rain and raise ocean levels as the excess atmospheric water vapor is returned to a liquid state- due to the transformation of heat into electricity which would be stored or used to move the little sea robots around.

is the sun uniform heat? how do ectothermic animals and plants using photosynthesis work? I'm not sure why you think you can magically break thermodynamic symmetry...

isn't the universe expanding at an accelerating rate? if the problem is excess planetary heat, you can use thermosynthesis to accelerate novel thermogenesis in pseudo-living species - imagine endothermic sea sponges cooling the oceans and helping to repopulate at risk ocean animals.

"this thing humans do cannot continue" is a weak argument. everything humans do is some expression of the natural state of conditions in their immediate environment, technology is just another convolutional cycle on top of the pre-existing ones, squeezing more efficiency from the raw resources existing there. the planet is not in balance, and ecosystems are not fixed. things are in a state of glacial flux with periods of extreme instability due to various cycle renewals - volcanic, tectonic, asteroid/comet impactor, solar, geomagnetic symmetry breaking, viral.

'man made causes' are a misnomer, they are just accelerated selection events, man happens to be a global selector for almost all living things, and man activity on the planet can be a mass extinction event due to many scaling factors, the most obvious one being the technology cycle mentioned previously, the efficiency it provides can be simplified to 'making more heat'.

it's easy to fall prey to goldilocks thinking - due to limited information and the tyranny of the present. try to think in terms beyond a human lifespan. look at the progress achieved in the past 300 years. if we wanted to we could spend the next 300 years returning earth back to a pre industrial epoch and wipe from the surface of the planet all traces of the modern advanced civilization we created, not by a cataclysm or destructive war but by planned intentional decolonisation. given that its possible and very likely to happen (perhaps a catalyst is required, like a new global religion) over the past 300k-1my this maybe happened multiple times. humans are still here in some form or another and they will continue to be here into the foreseeable future x10 my's, because they have shown capable of surviving (milankovitch scales, 100k, 41k, 23k years).

technology is dominant and makes the smartest humans think in brittle ways. the people shaping rocks for millennia were not stupid, they were just incapable of thinking beyond their stone paradigm. pretend to be a godlike alien silently watching the world from the largrangian point in the earth-moon system. millions and billions of years go by. once life begins on earth it continues into the present, the idea that humans, in the next few thousand years, will somehow pose an unconscious risk to a process that has survived and morphed for billions of years is a misreading of the story. what COULD happen is another mass selection event, where a human bottleneck eliminates 99.9% of all living things. that happened before and it's part of some larger cycle that humans are necessarily a part of (as living things) and what is considered causal could also be simply an expression of a deeper reason for living things to exist - to out compete other living things and monopolize the space available to them.

is the physicist a finitist? seems like he substituted growth which is the economists mantra, for change which is his. predicting the future is a waste of time, as an agent in the world you will either cause the future or be slave to it despite your best efforts either way. if it is knowable it will be unchangeable, given all your free actions will lead to the known outcome. it is clearly unknowable and therefore ununchangeable - since the capacity to measure any deviation or change does not exist. what will occur is as likely to occur or not occur had you participated or not.

my pet theory is that any time you see people attempting a cross-disciplinary leap of faith their parachute often fails to open. good 20th century examples being james watson and william shockley - both making the tempting leap from (bio)electrical systems to socio-communication ones, leading to self-embarrassment. the only interesting problem for the 21st century is how do you transform knowledge from one domain to another and retain it, the only way humans will survive their own extinction without reverting back to barbaric primitivism is to plasticize expertise and mass produce it.

text-to-speech synthesis + voice recognition can revive text based adventures as lightweight audio only games.

the best immersion engine is human imagination. a world in which literary fiction becomes interactive content, and authors begin to write for their work to be performed - to be read out loud and be repeatable with hidden narrative structures - creates an interesting alternative to the current direction the video game industry is going (total artificial immersion).

imagine setting a game in a real city and having players play through a day, mixing real physical locations and objects with virtual audio characters and allowing for the relatively low-tech solution of only engaging the one sense artificially but all other senses in reality to create a type of spacial-temporal ambiguity, the inversion of immersion.

would also be great for guided tours, recommending people places to visit, as a teaching aid and a typical shift away from reading as the primary mechanism our civilization is geared around which is a specialized skill that requires years of training and teaches bad habits around attention, severely limiting memory retention and creating unrealistic freedom when it comes to conveying information, when in the world things only happen once one way, in the artificial world of permanent words time stops to flow and the authors intent can be masked and layered behind tricks and tactics difficult to discern, it is much harder to lie and distort things in person.

it's a scattershot approach. the size of china and it's appetite for growth means it invests everywhere, its concentrated wealth and power is being dispersed globally in order to throw as many seeds as possible and water the ones that seek to grow. they're in africa, south america, eurasia, se asia, oceania, western europe, the middle east. it's very similar to what japan and south korea did domestically with miracle recoveries in their respective post war periods - but on a completely global scale. you give everyone a chance, and reinforce the ones who take it with good faith, the bad self-prune themselves and behavior can now be correlated to outcome. never throw good money after bad, and always work out some deal when you get something in return for something.

china needs this to work, or it is facing a real crisis (constitutional, demographic, cultural) in the near future. the middle income trap leads to stagnation and possible revolution unless you can centralize population (it needs 100 tokyos) and largely flatten your wealth distribution before it happens, but avoiding it is preferential to dealing with its effects.

the idea that china is doing this alone is also a fantasy, in reality it's working within the global system of international lending and finance to open as many doors as possible to trade, growth, accelerated development and good outcomes for domestic populations. european and american funds can't get through the door fast enough to get behind chinese at scale manufacturing and development of the undeveloped parts of the world.

i think they will fail, but for largely unmentioned and unrelated reasons to the ones presently discussed. any system like china will risk total collapse around leadership changeover, and it needs more than 20 years to achieve new stability goals and at that moment - when xi dies - it requires a stable partner to secure the hand off, and at the rate of hysteria in america, two decades from now, i can see capricious opportunism on the part of a deflated western elite take over sound judgement and prudent long term thinking. the quiet horror of the thousands of kilometers of abandoned high speed rail like skeletal bones across the world as we enter some new global minimum is vividly in my mind as i think of the most likely outcomes.

this is a joke right? "every nation but mine.... (acts in its own self-interest and needs to be encircled should it try to expand)".

this is exceptional in it's dullness. you want to benefit all of humanity but also out-compete every other nation on earth- but i thought a nation was just an idea, or is it an individual? maximize individual freedom, but prevent the inevitable conflict, loss, suffering and death that freedom would bring about. think totalitarian governments are a systemic risk to world peace, but not your absolutist ideas which allow no room for compromise with a simple difference of opinion but create escalating tensions and threatening rhetoric. what are you suggesting? in order to save the chinese people from themselves you will bomb them, lend them paper to rebuilt and prop up a puppet government?

china needs new markets, because the chinese people demand it, through their production and consumption.

when you anchor your superstructure of belief on a fantasy, divorced from history, politics, and the state of the natural world with it's finite resources, no good decision dilemmas, and complex inter-dependencies your conclusions are crackpot lunacies. show me an individual, and you will show me a barbarian, a beast of burden, a machine. a human being is neither free nor undivided, the very process of existence requires division, sacrifice, and the reduction of freedom. when you say 'i want to be free' i hear 'do what i say', 'think like i do'. give me the freedom to be free of you. the tyrants and despots of history, always promising the sky and offering a shallow hole in the dirt.

a close reading of the 19th and 20th century would do you well. it was the sudden contraction of american banks lending to weimar germany brought about by an ill prepared and newly formed central bank that caused communist and reactionary forces to emerge and fight for europe. trade restrictions were placed on germany with the express goal to twist the iron glove to war, largely for the benefit of expanding american manufacturing, banking and business interests in the war-weary and destitute post-war period. china is peacefully doing 80 years later what the allies did by force and no regard for human life. why else were so many cities fire bombed and destroyed? what did the americans do in korea? vietnam? what are american forces doing in the middle east? borrow, bomb and build. freedom is the carrot, capital is the stick.

the guilty man sees his sins in the faces of others. the free world doesn't look so free anymore.

so lets get down to realities, you will escalate, china will defend, you will go bankrupt since you can't manufacture a working plane anymore and the world doesn't want to buy your debt, china will take your place in the northern hemisphere and you can go back to setting up banana republics in your backyard and liberating the other america from bad ideas. how is venezeula working out?

nb. this post is largely in jest, you present and therefore receive the treatment of a fool.