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Vila 'There isn't a lock I can't open if I'm scared enough' Restal was one of the finest sci-fi characters on British telly. The caustic exchanges between him and Avon were priceless.

Michael was asked whether Vila could cope living in a society stripped of all technology [..] His answer was entirely in character: "I'm sure he would survive. As long as he could make fire, keep warm and meet a young lady. He'd learn a lot about the trees on the planet, build a little hut. It would be wonderful."

I'm not sure that is entirely in character. There's a marvellous episode 'The City at the Edge of the World' where Vila is the main focus of the story. He is given more or less the very opportunity described above and he turned it down:

KERRIL Are you coming with me? VILA I can't. KERRIL Why not? It's a chance to be free. You saw that place, it's beautiful. VILA But there's nothing there worth stealing [..] a thief isn't what I am, it's WHO I am.

https://www.hermit.org/b7/Episodes/scripts/City-EOTW.html

Michael Keating also did a cameo in 'Micro Men' which can be watched on YouTube.

Rest in peace.

Consciousness and God both seem to have this property in common: they're real but not what we think they are.

Only when we have a decent theory of consciousness will we know what counts as evidence for whether a particular entity is conscious or not.

  When Wellington thrashed Bonaparte,
  As every child can tell,
  The House of Peers, throughout the war,
  Did nothing in particular,
  And did it very well;
  Yet Britain set the world ablaze
  In good King George's glorious days!

Gather a group of the most powerful people in the land; give them ermine robes and manifold privileges; require of them nothing other than that they meet regularly to converse and debate in a prestigious and historical chamber. Allow them only the power to veto or delay legislation.

Gilbert and Sullivan were satirising but I think their point stands. It is possible to do nothing and to do it very well. While they're busy doing nothing they're not interfering or messing everything else up, even though they probably could outside the chamber.

The fact that heriditary peers are being ejected means nothing beyond the fact that these nobles have lost their inherent power.

The temperature a few metres below ground level is consistently cool (approx. 15 celcius) year round.

Could this be made the basis of an efficient cooling system?

It's funny how every source of knowledge converges to the same thing: mass media. Telling you what to think and trying to influence your behaviour rather than trying to inform you.

Using facts, omitting facts or emphasising particular facts over others in order to mislead you. The scientific journals are now included with their anonymous editorials. Peer review is pretty much the same as fact-checking.

Contrast this with good fiction, which employs falsehoods to point towards the truth: truth which cannot easily be verified but which is our real bread and butter.

It's hard not to trust answers which are superhumanly plausible.

Imagine being offered a choice of two oracles. The first oracle would give you an answer that is inspiring yet mysterious and oblique. The second gives an answer that is guaranteed to be unoriginal but also highly, highly plausible. It also maintains a record of all the questions and makes them available to unknown persons.

I miss being able to spontaneously buy a ticket and travel off to see a friend in another town or city. I did quite a lot as a young man with the help of my 'young person's railcard'. The cost would be prohibitive nowadays because only tickets bought well in advance are cheap.

Relatedly, microdosing with lactulose (which is very cheap) has a probiotic effect.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8353095/

Yes. There are distinct male virtues, such as courage, nobility and authority. But if a man isn't honest then he's not worthy of consideration. Or, if you like, he hasn't yet matured into manhood.

This is why so much of totalitarianism is about getting men to repeat lies. Or why those check boxes 'I have read and understood the terms and conditions' are harmful.

the heat is moved to the ground for storage

..or into a giant sand-filled barge which transports the thermal energy up north for the winter.

Doubling down and doubling down on some feeling (or lack of feeling) repeatedly isn't merely a strategy. It is the selling of ones's soul. There's no one left inside by the end of it, just a shell, with no creative power or freedom.

Don't envy them!

I think you've got it the wrong way around. All ideology is wrong, incorrect and fails in contact with reality. The true purpose of ideology (or 'the system') is to provide its adherents with the excuse they need to act badly. It could be relatively mild attempts to increase social status through hypocrisy and virtue-signalling. Or it could be to commit murder, torture and so on.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it:

Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.

What obscures matters is that evil tends to operate in layers with each layer deceived by the layer above it in the hierarchy (or below it, if you prefer a lowerarchy). So at the bottom there is a multitude of relatively decent people who don't want to kill and really do believe in the system.

I go for a decent walk most days and it doesn't require effort or get boring. It goes well with listening to headphones and relaxing the eyes on the horizon plus seeing a bit of nature and humanity in action.

This does me a lot of good however the only upper body exercise I get is playing the piano! I can't see myself joining a gym or doing press-ups reliably in the long-term. I need to find a suitable hobby which has upper body + other benefits while being fun/interesting and low-risk. Carrying logs has helped but we have enough firewood now.

Author is clearly not a happy bunny.

Some people may be motivated by a wish to escape other people, but many will want to go to space because it's so cool. In other words: for adventure, romance and blazing a trail for other people to follow.

Having the right spirit and the right motivation creates mental well-being, not material or social conditions. By those standards, medieval life was far worse than today, but I don't think the people then were less happy or less motivated than people today. Quite the reverse.

I'm not even a programmer, but I can tell that dates are ambiguous a lot of the time.

e.g. dd/mm/yyyy (British) and mm/dd/yyyy (USA) can be confused for the first twelve days of every month.

So, given the high volume of international communication, I think we should hand-write months in full, or at least as the first three letters (Jan, Feb, Mar, ..., Dec)

We should also abandon three-letter acronyms (but that's another story).

Thumb on white notes. 4th finger on black because it is weaker than 2,3. But these are rules of thumb(!)

The original reads easier in the voice of the cookie monster:

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

I used to think the same when people spoke of social media being addictive, but not any more. Drugs aren't autonomous either, however they clearly do remove some people's autonomy. I can well imagine now that a person could be addicted, particularly if he's grown up with it and has used it in the past to avoid facing his problems.

“Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.” ― Augustine of Hippo

(Not saying anybody around here is wicked just remembering a striking quote)

tools that augment cognition when used intentionally can become parasitic when designed to maximize engagement at the expense of user agency

Wonderful definition, thank you. It has reach beyond software I think, into areas like harmful memes (mental parasites); even drug addiction.

Chemotherapy as I understand it works by killing rapidly-dividing cells (which is why your hair falls out).

Fenbendazole purportedly slows down cell division, allowing the immune system a chance to catch up with the cancer cells.

So they would seem to employ similar mechanisms. I hope more clinical trials are performed soon.

Yes! Similarly for text books, which are riddled with errors, generally speaking. They should have have an email address for reader-submitted errata printed in large friendly letters on the inside front cover.

Thanks. Yes it is strange. I do accept there's some overlap between propaganda and memeing. Yet whatever the intentions (or paygrade, or artistic ability) of the author of a meme, the fact remains that once it is posted he has no control over its destiny. So ultimately it is the funniest/most beautiful/salutary/plausible memes that get refined and selected for, i.e. which supply the strongest signal, and which inspire new memes in turn.

Nah. Compressed ideas are simply very good explanations! Ideologues aren't open to changing their ideas, but some other people do so occasionally. One can have philosophical assumptions and/or preferences without wishing to impose them on everyone else.

Not everyone is an ideologue. Some people are just on the side of what is, or what is real.

Yes however I was not referring to memes in the broadest sense but memes as humorous (usually) images with captions, shared online. Unlike propaganda and advertising these are spontaneously created by unpaid individuals (though Omar is right there is a certain amount of overlap as always with general categories).

What puts them 'on the side of reality' is that humour, rather like beauty, has deep connections with truth. It doesn't work otherwise. It's one of the ways we update our model of reality...

Managing, employing and leveraging memetic power

This is propaganda, or advertising, not memeing. Propaganda is used to promote specific ideologies; memes arise spontaneously to counter them. Since all ideologies/-isms are by nature wrong, memes are generally-speaking a good thing. They're on the side of reality. They use rhetoric and fiction to point to the truth, often via some form of reductio ad absurdum. By contrast mainstream propaganda uses facts selectively in order to distort the big picture, mislead or simply distract people.

I realise the word 'gluttony' is off-putting (for atheists for instance) but I don't know a better one. Perhaps 'over-excitement'?

The symptoms of excitement are of course similar to the fight-or-flight response. Raised heart rate for one. Butterflies in the stomach indicate release of adrenaline, which in turn raises blood glucose -- not from the food being eaten but from the body's stores. So there's a link right there.

How excited you are about a given food will depend not only upon the foodstuff itself but also on your personal taste and personal history. If you have taken pleasure in its consumption many times in the past this may affect your present level of excitement.

'Arousal' is another word that just sprang to mind.

One factor that scientific food experiments don't seem to include is gluttony. Presumably because it is subjective (though nonetheless real for that). Yet if people are motivated by the amount of comfort and/or pleasure they obtain from eating their favourite foods this may have an effect on their physiological response.

Would adding Oxi Clean or somesuch powder to the wash help to sterilize clothing?

In what manner are they procured?

This really is the key: the manner reveals the motivation and morality is about motivations, which makes it understandable why slavery existed in the ancient world.

Suppose your country is invaded by a belligerent neighbour one summer and you manage to fend off the attack and capture most of the enemy soldiers.

What do you do with them afterwards:

(1) let them go, (2) kill them, (3) cut off their right thumbs and release them, (4) make them your slaves?

The obvious problem with (1) is that if you let them go they may return next year and succeed in the job of murdering you and destroying your nation or tribe. (2) and (3) are fairly cruel and barbaric.

Which leaves (4).