2021-11-20
Readings
This is an interesting coverage of the politics of the book and movie form of “Starship Troopers”; years ago I enjoyed both, and I’ve thought about it every so often since when watching the evolution of American politics. In recent years, despite having left my Libertarian views many years back, I’ve come back in contact with people in those camps online, and I’m realising that many of the groups that self-describe as “trad” may in fact be fairly friendly to Heinlein’s ideals. This bothers me. I see a lot of value in pluralism, I don’t value masculinity, and while I may share some of their enemies (particularly progressivism), I consider their perspectives also abhorrent. I sometimes wonder whether Heinlein’s society would be more stable than broad-franchise Democracy. Although even if it were, that would not be an argument for it. Reasonable stability is good enough. If we went overboard with maximal stability, a sterile Terra with no humans alive would likely be quite stable. Wouldn’t make it worthwhile.
Article on rhythm processing in humans, and a discovery of a similar feature in a lemur. Apparently musical appreciation in other primates is an active field of research: https://www.sciencealert.com/for-the-first-time-a-rhythm-universal-to-humans-has-been-found-in-a-primate
This is a nice story on a possible future treatment for Alzheimers. It warms the heart to hear about common maladies being made less mal. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-021-01385-7
The main argument made in this video on the simulation hypothesis is, in my view, not a strong one. Largely because if we were a simulation, we know pretty much nothing about the outside world, even whether the computational or information-theoretical laws or even mathematics we’ve built have any application to the world outside. My objection to the simulation hypothesis (as presented) is primarily based on uncertainty and empiricism - we can’t make statistical claims over such wildly unknown things as ranges of potential states of being. Or at least not reliably - those intuitions are not tested by intuition, and so we should not give them credence.
A refresher about how electricity works; it’s unfortunate that the metaphors that most people, myself included, use to understand circuit diagrams and electricity in general are incorrect and only useful for certain kinds of analysis. Maybe this is generally the case for most metaphors, but for electricity the common metaphors are more wrong than most - meaning there are practical-to-demonstrate areas of difference. Still worth chewing on these things and using them as an example of how metaphors and science fit together:
Some years back, enough single-cell recording (and other neuroimaging methods) proved sufficient to reconstruct images from the visual field based on activity in the early visual cortex. This paper suggests, at least for C elegans, the same trick is now within reach for olfactory: https://phys.org/news/2021-11-scientists-machine-based-brain-worms.html
The history and geography of Venice and how being an unraided relic helps a city:
Unprompted Thoughts
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of anchors and shifting winds in life; what it means to have the anchor down versus up, and to steer the ship of one’s life in different directions. There’s always wind, but we don’t always decide to be receptive to it; there is value in settling into certain kinds of situations for awhile, in whatever domain of life we’re talking about.
Debate should not the only form of structured conversation on divisive issues we have. Apart from argument maps, we also might imagine conversations that have either declarations of arguments or data sources one won’t listen to (“mainstream sources only” or “I won’t listen to arguments of the form …”) or attempts to get agreement on clarifying the topic or scope of discussion (“do you mind if we avoid getting into…”) which might get full or partial agreement along the way. We should have more experimentation with these forms, not because well-structured conversations always lead to good policy or stances, but because they (probably) are usually better than underthought stances. At least for clarity and mutual understanding. If I know how you think on topic X, I might better be able to guess what you’ll think on topic Y.
I’ve been playing with a possibly too-open-ended question - the minimal surface area of a body of fluid is, in normal space, a sphere. Are there variant notions of minimal surface area for fluid interactions - we’ll call them “effective minimal surface area”, that we could construct through some kind of manipulation, that are useful to limit interactions? A common case is, in an environment with gravity, to have a container for the lower portion of a liquid and to only consider the interactions with the atmosphere part of the effective minimal surface area. That example is pretty dull. What other versions of this notion are implementable and useful? On the table are tools like magnetic containment, radical differences in density (objects don’t readily lose heat to vacuum because there is no matter to carry heat away), etc.
How might debates work where each team is about 30 largely anonymous people, and where what the “side” says is chosen by a team-moderator (or set of them, or a leader)? The idea behind this would be to limit regret from “I didn’t think of that angle” and from “I don’t know everything on that topic”. More broadly I want to imagine debate format variants that would limit the impact of framing and rhetoric, and more broadly make bad tricks harder to pull off.
Current Events
Rittenhouse verdict - I haven’t been closely following the trial, on the basis that most of the time news stories about individual people don’t matter. I broadly trust juries and our legal system, and I think they likely reached the right legal verdict. I don’t see Rittenhouse as a hero, and think bringing assault weapons to protests makes it much more likely someone will end up dead; a violent-but-non-deadly conflict too easily turns into a deadly one when either side has a high-throughput weapon. I reject the claim (which sounds ridiculous to me) that it has anything to do with white supremacy. I think the police should have been there stopping protestors from destroying places (they’re better trained and equipped). I’m annoyed that so many people seem to ignore the specifics of the case so they can make Rittenhouse into a hero or a villain of their story. There has also been a lot of confusion in the general public on basic facts of the case, with some media orgs failing to verify basic facts increasing the problem.
The CDC lifted what restrictions are left for Covid19 vaccine boosters. NYC and NYS already were encouraging broad booster use, but their encouragements were ineffective because all the sources also worked with Federal/CDC tied orgs, leaving the federal guidance the only one that really mattered. Annoying how badly coordinated this all was. I’ll be getting a booster as soon as the scheduling websites start updating. Haven’t decided which yet.
Recently there was a vote on leadership for the International Teamsters Union, with Sean O’Brien (from the more aggressive faction) winning out over the Hoffa-style negotiation-heavy faction. This probably will fly under the radar for a lot of people, but I wouldn’t be surprised if either the strikes or the different negotiation targets lead to changes with surprising impact, particularly if these results are not just a temporary stance. Article below is before the results were known, but better summarised the factions than anything else I’ve seen: https://labornotes.org/2021/10/teamster-insurgents-plan-win-and-what-comes-after
Chile is trying to untangle issues left in its constitution during dictatorship, while also voting on a new President to replace their outgoing one who has been hampered by being caught in shady dealings. It will be interesting to see if Boric (left-wing) or Kast (far-right) gets the vote. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/19/political-shakeup-on-horizon-as-chile-to-elect-new-president
Dr Oz, a prominent pseudoscience-pushing doctor who has been boosted by Oprah (she often boosts people whom society would be better off never learning about), is preparing for a possible political run. I’m not happy about this; our politics needs more moderates (in candidates and people voting), but it doesn’t need more celebrity. Using the latter to get the former feels like a dangerous development; perhaps it’s a way to get less nutty people some pre-built name-recognition (as a counter to the “red meat” that people like AOC and DeSantis toss out frequently), but what a cost. Wondering how to build talk circuits and other things that boost reasonable candidates enough to counteract the “crazy person says things to get your blood moving” prominence route.
Reviewlets
Macbook Pro Max - I recently got one of these from work, to start porting some Mac software to be native on the new architecture. It’s a very, very heavy laptop, that otherwise should be quality but Apple screwed up a few things. The move away from USB-C charging was a dumb move; the new magsafe detracts from the design. Apple also limits (currently) the display in software from running at native resolution, preferring to do software scaling and not giving the user the option of native mode. The keyboard is quite nice, and the system as a whole feels fast. It’s nice to finally have an M1 that has enough RAM to work with larger datasets. If Apple had made a few different decisions this could have been a great (if overly heavy) system. It’s just pretty-good as is.
Pokemon Diamond/Pearl Remakes (game) - Avoiding buying this because a new “feature” has been retrofitted into the game, that of forcing XP share, and it cannot be turned off. To me this is a game ruiner. I don’t understand why Nintendo decided not to make this an option.
Far Cry 6 Insanity DLC - surprisingly fun. I never played the game this is a homage to (I find the lead character’s most well-known quip annoying), but the DLC is well-designed and gives a pretty good idea what its two successors will be like. Looking forward to them.
Amusements
Fun reminder of how humans live in environments not suited to us:
I occasionally think about the movie “Big Fish”, alongside Terry Gilliam’s “Adventures of Baron von Munchausen”. This is a fun analysis of it that almost landed in readings:
Elephant social bonds:
Recent Music
The Babic/Albrecht cover of “You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid”
James Brown’s “Soul Power” is a classic that I use as a mood-changer. It’s impossible to hear his vocals over such a well-produced song and not have it fill my mind.
Dschingis Khan’s “Moskau” is a silly and enjoyable song - feels like self-celebratory kitsch. Maybe we need more of that.
Evanescence’s “Yeah Right” is an interesting evolution of the band’s sound, which depends a lot on the lead vocalist and transitions between brief solos and backing. I haven’t heard them use this set of beat structures in their earlier music.
Frank Zappa’s “Jewish Princess” feels like a sampler pack of Zappa’s entire catalogue (apart from his Jazz stuff, which is also amazing but different). It’s also, by title and lyrics, probably not something to play around people who are easy to offend, but I’m very hard to offend.
And while we’re on the topic, Frank Zappa’s “Night School” is from his experimental Jazz album; recently I’ve been trying to identify common sound elements between his Jazz and his other music. There’s some commonality but so far it’s proven hard to put into words.
This is a nice analysis by a voice coach of the Babic cover of “You’re Gonna Go Far, Kid”. The analysis adds some nice depth: