2022-01-29
Readings
Recently I watched an IQ2US Debate on American foreign policy - specifically whether the US is giving up on international leadership. I entered (and left) it thinking that the answer is “yes”, but this was one of the better and friendlier debates I’ve seen, on an important topic.
The latest development in understanding the pipelike from stem cells to specific cell types leads us to understand ways to directly transform cells from one developed type to another without going through the stem phase again. I wonder what the limits are for this kind of transformation. https://phys.org/news/2022-01-mutant-stem-cells-defy.html
I’ve been thinking about this twitter stream, and how it fits (or does not) with explicit denunciations of atheists in religious holy works; given a sufficiently large and accepted norm that we’re sometimes going to condemn rather than engage our opponents, is there a point in pushing other norms? -
I agree with this summary that talking faces have become much better over recent years (in games, “The Outer Worlds” does a good job), but getting things to the level of indistinguishability is a good goal with a number of interesting possibilities across many industries: https://techxplore.com/news/2022-01-realistic-animations.html
Advances in manipulation of bodies to rebuild rather than scar when suffering large-scale tissue loss: https://phys.org/news/2022-01-treatment-frogs-regenerate-amputated-legs.html
Pulsar with a weird pulse frequency: https://phys.org/news/2022-01-milky-astronomers.html
China’s plans in space over the next few years: https://www.space.com/china-five-year-plan-space-exploration-2022
Good reminder about the problems with “ooh, shiny” in policy proposals:
Explainer on colour spectra and why there are no stars of certain colours:
Unprompted Thoughts
Over the last year, we’ve seen Mojang (now as part of Microsoft) back off from a number of more ambitious feature proposals for Minecraft; this got me thinking about the weight of organisations and the difficulty in a turtle maintaining nimblitude with the world on its back - by taking responsibility for not breaking a lot of the things a very large audience counts on, they may slowly doom their projects to irrelevancy. This might also apply to companies and governments in general; I wonder how expensive the caution needs to be and if there are ways to either avoid it or manage it better. We might be tempted to dig into theories of managability and the scarcity of central control.
I often think about the search for non-square beats - syncopation or other irregular beat structures in music. I wonder if it’s possible to “compose by hills” if there are better ways to think of and compose music; whether creating a 2d hill-like structure for beat would work and could be an alternative to time signatures.
Videogame music, when I was younger and perhaps in current generations too, has a negative connotation; while in some eras it was chiptunes and overly simple construction, there is still (often) a shift from music as a form of poetry for self expression where anything weird enough is a metaphor, to things that look like metaphor to those not familiar with a game but which are in fact mundane description of the world of the game. It is harder to communicate when metaphor itself is uncertain (although it’s possible to miss metaphors).
A lot of strange results manifest when people mix hard logic with soft concepts. There’s a quip that “every program has at least one bug and can be reduced in size by one line, from which it can be concluded that every program can be reduced to one line, which is wrong”. Building systems of logic that navigate us through life requires we have reasonable expectations for those logics, and that they handle fuzziness well. More formal systems have extremely limited (if high-productivity) applications.
Some time ago there was a youtube account that did “recuts” of classic movies - turning “Mary Poppins” into a horror film, or “The Shining” into a RomCom. It might be interesting to take a lesson from those as a reminder of how different the mental lives of different people can be, and the difficulty of understanding emotion-tinged perspectives of others. Even a vibe of “everything’s cool” or “I just need to get through the day to get back home to my kid” might lead to the same situation at work being parsed very differently from people who really care about status and their career-ladder-climbing
Policy approach to crime - between discipline, nurture, and neglect, I lean to usually following discipline and treat any moves towards nurture as experimental and needing justification before they’re normalised. Discipline-focused approaches also should be fact-justified, but at a lower threshold of proof. This isn’t that discipline must be more trustworthy, but rather that airy and infeasible ideas are easier to come up with on the nurture side and we need to be more ready to cut them off when they go awry
Writings
Musings on challenges in preservation of meaning - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1omtj7c5T6NJaGhFL-tZ6FxCCC5AOHM8CYbxjcM1FUr0/edit?usp=sharing
Youtube video on UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights -
Current Events
In the US, SCOTUS judge Breyer announced his retirement; fortunately as we’re in an era of unique dysfunction, Biden has enough legislative support to get this appointment (which should be his) through (Republicans breached a pretty strong norm by stealing one of what should have been Obama’s appointments recently and seem keen to continue with their “total war” approach to politics for now). Biden’s announcement that he was looking to seat a female black appointee raised some eyebrows. Probably unfairly on the right (several of their recent presidents have expressed a demographic intent), but I oppose demographic preferences for jobs as a general principle and would like to see them avoided/banned.
The Central American country of Honduras has a new president, Xiomara Castro. Wife of a former president removed by a coup, she’s focusing on political and economic reforms but faces a large mess, a divided legislature, and apparently a number of self-created problems too (nepotism being a fairly reliable marker of poor political leadership).
Sometimes big tech companies respond well to public outrage (if it rises to the attention of execs). The recent plan by Google to require certain types of accounts to become paid or be terminated sparked an outrage, and Google backed off on that, offering what looks like minimal reasonable accomodation. This doesn’t in my view remove the need for concern over their power; there are only so many things the general public can pay attention to.
On that note, in the latest stupid culture shit, musician Neil Young recently tried to force Joe Rogan off of Spotify by demanding it remove one of them from the service. Young was removed, and there has been a lot of dazzlingly stupid commentary around it suggesting we view disputes like this as “who we side with”. I think we should instead view it through the light of principles and policies rather than siding with the right person. I have very little opinion on Neil Young (not familiar with his music) and I already know Joe Rogan’s a bit of an idiot. I think Rogan’s (dumb) stances on covid are the focus of Young’s complaint, and while I think it can be justified during a pandemic for a platform to remove people or annotate their content for pushing dangerous advice (more broadly, blocking dangerous medical misinformation seems justifiable on a permanent basis - the old “tide pod challenge” stuff or pro-ana stuff being other examples), I don’t think it’s acceptable for individuals to get in on it because it too much resembles an individual right/norm to veto platforms to pressure them for censorship (even when we see censorship as permissible); that opens a cultural can of worms we should keep closed. I understand Young’s stance but the narrowness of what’s justifiable for the platform cannot extend to him as an individual. And I generally reject the take that part of a healthy pluralism is making a world where we frequently pressure platforms (or employers) to fire/remove people.
Amusements
Still loving this quip from MST3k:
I’ve been enjoying all the nearly-impossible (and very creative) race courses this guy has been going through in GTA on his Youtube channel:
Some nice absurdist humour that reminds me a bit of the “Society for putting Things on top of Other Things” bit from Monty Python:
I get a lot of laughs out of humour (and games) where one can be a total idiot:
Regular Pusheen amusements:
Recent Music
Lera Lynn - “Free Again” -
Caravan Palace - Clash
Alan Jackson - Livin’ on Love