2022-03-12
Readings
One of the surprising things about this undersea farming experiment is that the saltiness of the water around it isn’t either corroding the materials (or maybe it is) or getting into the water in each unit; It’d be interesting if this were to be another form that high-tech farming might take, f I wonder about its practicality. Vertical farming, by contrast, seems to be taking off.
An introduction to machine learning for those who at least somewhat understand classical computing:
I haven’t thought a lot about training robots for doctors; the ability to provide better feedback to the trainee seems like a win. Although it also has me wondering whether these are often individually owned by doctors offices as part of continuing ed requirements: https://techxplore.com/news/2022-03-robots-realistic-pain-doctors-physical.html
Life probably exists in many inaccessible places on Terra; the subsurface Arctic is no exception (guessing this has survived independently from when Antarctica was further north): https://phys.org/news/2022-03-dark-ocean-antarctica-largest-ice.html
Theoretical advances in materials science on electronegativity and its interaction with pressure: https://phys.org/news/2022-03-weird-world-high-pressure-chemistry-simple.html
Unprompted Thoughts
Funding science education as a slightly indirect way of funding science? The video above about machine learning does a decent job at explaining the ideas around machine learning.. to a certain crowd. That’s one of the central difficulties in teaching - effectively bringing people from what they know now to a better version of themselves who knows more? It takes knowing where they are to know what ground needs to be covered, and available metaphors to get them good motion in a productive direction. There’s benefit in teaching even when one doesn’t get everyone to the goal, but to make it a best use of time for all involved, tailoring for the audience matters a lot. Unclear how to solve this.
I had a frustrating discussion this week with someone who is overly into the dialectic; the idea that societal improvement and/or intellectual achievement generally takes the form of a thesis, then an antithesis (really, a competing other thesis), and then a synthesis between the two theses. While I think this pattern is worth knowing about, I think it’s severely limiting to make it a central concept of organisation of thought (or history); reality doesn’t organise itself in a way where any single pattern is a universal key for understanding. Often when two ideas clash, one of them simply dies. Sometimes both. And that’s often what should happen. There are many other possible outcomes and possible summaries that come from a clash. This is one of the reasons I believe eclecticism is useful in philosophy - more useful than grand narratives at least.
Out of my usual curiosity mixed with having heard a bit of the usual comedians having a go at the Chinese language, I’ve been visiting various Youtube channels focused on teaching Chinese; strange to finally put in a bit of effort to learn a language I’ve heard so often over my life. I doubt I’ll learn enough to speak the language at any functional level, but even at this age the effort is fun. It’s amusing how little the comic impressions of Chinese actually resemble the language, but that’s no different from comic impressions of other languages (comic impressions of German tend to be quite amusing and rarely resemble a language at all)
Current Events
The current reality on the ground in Ukraine continues, with western forces applying a very strong sanctions regime but not directly engaging with combat with Russia; arms and aid are slipping over the border to Ukraine (thankfully), but Russia is looking to bring on militias from other countries (notably Syria) while it makes up increasingly ridiculous excuses to justify its invasion. I don’t know if Ukraine has what it needs to start pushing Russia back out of its borders; I’d love to believe it can do that, retaking Crimea and all of its eastern lands, but I worry that this will become a protracted guerilla operation, or that it will be pressured into ceding land for peace (and thus rewarding Russia’s aggression). I am very frustrated that western forces are not marching in. I understand the argumeents why not, but I think they’re bad arguments.
Jussie Smollett, an activist who hired actors to fake a race-based attack on himself, was sentenced to 150 days in jail; I went through the ride probably a lot of Americans went when first hearing about the “attack”, then hearing it was a hoax, and then hearing about people who don’t seem to care and who are still standing by him. 150 days feels pretty mild to me, but I suppose there are no specific victims; his hoax was designed to change minds. It’s disturbingly close to a targeted false claim though, and those can ruin lives. I’m glad he was at least dumb enough to get caught (although once one brings other people into one’s hoax, a lot of control and safety goes out the window). It’s also a good reminder to the public not to be too credulous
Recently, Florida’s Senate passed some legislation: Parental Rights in Education Bill; I mostly heard it described as a “Don’t Say Gay” bill, and it got me wondering what it actually did and how well the smear actually matched the reality. At least according to NBCNews, it prohibits classroom content on the topic of sexual orientation and gender-identity. To me, as a bisexual man in his 40s, this is a mixed bag; I don’t want gender-identity frameworks to be pushed in classrooms (I define gender genetically, and it appears that a generation of progressive teachers has really been trying to shove gender-as-identity-and-distinct-from-sex as an idea). I also see it as legitimate for governments to regulate classroom content (they already do; people teaching young earth creationism in geology class won’t and shouldn’t last long). If I felt I could trust classrooms to teach without indoctrinating on the topic, this might look like a bad bill. Right now I don’t have that trust, although I suspect the conservatives pushing against it are also not trustworthy. It leaves me, for now, without a strong conclusion.
South Korea narrowly elected a cultural conservative, Yoon Suk-Yeol, to its presidency; his views and stances are colourful. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-60685141
Reviewlets
Something from the Nightside (book) - This feels like what happens when you take an imaginative GM from tabletop role-playing games and have them write a novel; the worldbuilding is fantastic, but the writing is terrible. The problems are excessive purple prose mixed with the need for everythiing described to be maximal; the categorical and measurable are replaced by the maximal. This is the first in a long series; I haven’t decided yet if I’ll give the rest a shake.
Escape from Yokai Land (book) - A welcome, but far too brief, return to the main character from the early Laundry Files book. The “far too brief” part was made worse by my not noticing (in a way that can only happen with digital media) that it was a short story rather than a novel; I was settling in for a longer story right at the point that it wrapped up.
Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnarok (game) - I’m enjoying this a lot - there’s plenty of content, and the new powers are great (I particularly enjoy being able to turn into a bird for flight, but all of them are solid). It’s a little underbaked (crashed on me during a boss fight, and the fight animations for the new opponents generally are unsatisfying), but not enough to ruin it. I think the only other change I’d make is to change the player to be Odin to match the story (I like my Eivor, but she’s out of place in this story and it’s a bit jarring).
Prime Deceptions (book) - This is second in a series, after a first book which I mostly liked (despite some annoying embedded social values). As very soft sci-fi it’s an easy read, and it’s not playing with any big ideas so much as focusing (so far) on cozy relations between the main characters.
Amusements
From an era of romantic exploration, Ernest Shackleton’s polar explorer ship’s grave near Antarctica was found: https://phys.org/news/2022-03-explorer-shackleton-ship-century.html
Less an amusement and more a collection of horrifying things relating to nuclear weapons and experiments around them:
Comedy and horror mix pretty well at a variety of ratios; for anyone who’s been following the LockPickingLawyer Youtube channel, this will be very funny:
Recent Music
The “Bay Temple” music from Majora’s Mask (an older videogame) is nicely complex and I’ve been listening to it a lot this week as a kind of musical-mental roughage:
Damien Rice - Cannonball - Sad and mellow song
Gealdyr - Sol - This is probably old norse poetry, the kind of thing where I’d love to hear it live around a campfire