2022-04-30
Readings
UAE’s orbiter “Hope” discovered some surprising auroras in the atmosphere of Mars: https://www.space.com/mars-new-aurora-massive-scale
New techniques to separately manipulate molecules based on their chirality should lead to better larger processes that can study differences in their properties: https://phys.org/news/2022-04-chemical-mirror-images.html
Whether it’s phrased as an alternative to photosynthesis or a better way of doing it, there’s interesting work in adapting bacterial processes to photosynthesise more efficiently than plants (which has a lot of potential applications): https://phys.org/news/2022-04-soil-microbe-rev-artificial-photosynthesis.html
Efficient logistics for recycling chemical waste: https://phys.org/news/2022-04-chemical-ways-products.html
Efficient CRISPR-like ways to modify molecules - this is described as being mostly for lab use (still an important advance), but I wonder if this might eventually see broader use outside the lab: https://phys.org/news/2022-04-technique-delete-atoms-molecule.html
While I don’t think the state has a “must-do-this” level responsibility to existing business models, I think Conover’s suggestion here - that it should consider them as part of the public good measured to evaluate media company mergers - is reasonable. And I agree with the premise - that the excessive concentration of ownership is harmful. It’s not clear that blocking mergers would successfully prevent that.
The construction of magnets:
History of the venerable 6502 processor:
Unprompted Thoughts
Sometime back I worked through the topic of how some of our (American) norms of not having the state impinge on or aid our personal lives don’t work well for people whose professions (like an Astronaut in orbit) don’t permit them distance between their personal and employed lives. I’ve recently been thinking about what sorts of social norms and laws we would evolve if we had no ability to get separation from each other interpersonally - if we couldn’t walk away from those bad conversations. Perhaps in very early human tribal society this was the norm, and some of our social defects of today came from things embedded into our instincts in that era?
By-and-large i think one of the things that’s worked well in the US until very recent dysfunction is the staggered influence that political movements have on the Judicial Branch of our government; unfortunately people have realised this and figured out how to manipulate weaknesses in its wording, but the deliberately staggered pace of intake to the Supreme Court makes it difficult for any new political movements to control that branch completely. While having the Judiciary the most staggered branch is what we’re familiar with, I think it’s interesting to imagine a government where the Executive or the Legislative has that kind of staggered input instead (or perhaps additionally). Such a government would still be representative, but a very slow-moving form of representative. Distance from short-lived social movements could be a plus, but could also slow down reforms or lock in older approaches to current events. By contrast, a non-staggered (and thus probably less scholarly) Judicial Branch could be pretty scary.
Having donated primarily to non-Progressive Democratic candidates but also a few non-Trumpist Republicans means I get a lot of texts and postal mail from all over the American political spectrum, many of them not grokking my politics. There’s a lot of talk of the cultural struggles in American society, and from shrill voices on both sides talking about “winning the culture war”. I find it interesting that while I have strong opinions on the matter, I don’t think moving the norms to where I want them to land (again) can be done by siding with the louder voices on both sides; what I want on most issues is the center-left consensus of the 1990s, which I don’t think Progressives want, and only a few Trumpian-Conservatives seem very committed to that either. It might be approximated by donations to groups like FIRE (which sort-of does what the ACLU used to do before their Progressive capture), but that’s only on a certain set of issues. I’d love to see some kind of a movement aiming for exactly this across everything, and I suspect it might even be popular; it’d take a lot of work to articulate it clearly though.
In supporting scientific software, I think one of the mental “tools of the trade” that makes software a lot less scary is something I’d coin a term for - “computational materialism”. The idea being that when one has a good foundation in systems knowledge, one knows roughly what’s possible and what mechanisms people tend to build to solve problems. That, like materialism in investigating the natural world, is a good grounding for investigating a variety of phenomena, and it’s something that I think a lot of people don’t have (and maybe never do).
Current Events
Russia’s war on Ukraine continues, with some cities changing hands and western powers being increasingly willing to directly supply arms as the Russian atrocities continue. Russia is using its natural resources and threats of nuclear war in an attempt to get western powers to stop helping Ukraine defend itself.
Macron, thankfully, was reelected to the Presidency of France; he beat Le Pen with a reasonable margin, but the fact that she got as many votes as she did is worrying for French politics. I hope Macron has a plan to figure out how to fix that.
Meanwhile, in Solvenia, a parliamentary election pushed out Trump-style right-wing populist leaders, as another relief. I don’t claim that the left should always win, but I’m comfortable claiming that populists should always lose, wherever they are on the spectrum.
Elon Musk’s attempts to buy Twitter were apparently successful, with a lot of people wondering what it’s going to mean. Musk has gone on a celebratory set of truly stupid tweets afterwards, reveling in the attention. My take is that Musk is a cretin who is intellectually unimpressive, but he may end up doing some good anyhow. We’ll have to see how the changes play out, when we know what they are. So far Musk’s only real statements that may turn into policy are nonsensical - that free speech is well-defined by the First Amendment; either that means absolutely nothing (because private actors are not bound by 1A) or it means he intends to have Twitter act as if it’s bound by the rules the Government is (which means we probably will see a deluge of spam, for starters). Maybe he’ll wise up. Twitter has become a lot less free-speech-oriented so improvements are possible at least.
Ed Balls Day, which I think of as a lovely Internet holiday, happened again. It’s the anniversary of when British MP Ed Balls, meaning to search for mentions of his name on Twitter (not particularly healthy, but understandable), accidentally tweeted his own name, and a lot of people thought it was funny and retweeted it. It turned into a meme, and then a minor Internet holiday. We could use some more levity.
Reviewlets
Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe (game) - Moreso than the original game, this feels like inhabiting a joke. The writing is excellent, the humour comes in a variety of styles, and there are responses for
Rogue Legacy 2 (game) - This, like Binding of Isaac before it, is a game best played in small doses. I’ve had it for awhile in its various beta forms, but they’ve added some nice new features for the release, and some of the character classes are fun. The main limit is the level design, which gets pretty repetitive, but in smaller doses that’s not so much of a problem.
Amusements
This bit of comedy touches on the inconsistent reasoning behind our mechanisms of disgust, piling in a bit of the fictional-context tweaks to our normal reason:
Astronauts (at least NASA - I wonder if it is common to those of other nations) have a well-worked-out set of hand signals to communicate practical meaning while in space; I wonder if ASL being more general meant it would have been too slow for common uses:
Unsurprisingly, sunscreen is much more visible with UV spectrum cameras:
Recent Music
Johan Soderqvist - Then We Are Together - This is part of the soundtrack to the horror/romance film “Let the Right One In”, which leaned more heavily on the romance side than the horror (although the way the film made the horror seem normal perhaps should be disturbing)
Spiraling - The Connection
Danny Elfman - Happy - I wonder if, had Oingo Boingo lasted, this would have been an example of where their sound would have ended up