2022-10-29
Readings
- Some jumping spiders may have the rare-for-spiders ability to visually distinguish animate and inanimate objects; I wasn’t aware of this capability difference and it’s surprising (to me) that such a capability wouldn’t’ve developed very early evolutionarily and retained across most animal life: https://www.sciencealert.com/jumping-spiders-may-have-a-cognitive-ability-previously-only-found-in-vertebrates
- IBEX is mapping some of the weird shapes of the boundary of the heliosphere: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01798-6
- Exploring oddities in properties of protons: https://phys.org/news/2022-10-physicists-hitch-proton.html
- Advances in understanding the membrane between mitochondria and their host cells, and their history: https://phys.org/news/2022-10-door-mitochondrial-membrane.html
- Exploring brainteasers like this helps, I think, avoid a rigidity of thought that would otherwise lead one to really bad conclusions and manipulability:
- Stop Removal is an important thing to push for in transit systems, or more generally making sure that transit systems don’t bend too far to predictable demands of excessive stops; each individual demand doesn’t slow the system much and makes the people served by the stop happier, but taken together they make the whole system far slower and thus less useful. There’s a tragedy of the commons thing going on there:
Thoughts
- What does it mean when most parts of the general population can’t (or won’t) recreate a working society given their own devices? Is this part of the job of civics? To teach people in society to work together in a sutainable, scalable way? To build institutions? I’ve been thinking about this in the light of being reminded of discourse within activist communities (which is often but not always highly dysfunctional, saved only because it doesn’t need to actually do anything and take on responsibility for anything real). There are some ideas and intuitions that don’t fit with things actually working - some kinds of moralising, some kinds of anti-reason. How do we short-circuit them? Maybe that’s easy. Harder: How do we realise we should short-circuit them? And how do we deal with the general problem that doing the right thing is exhausting, perhaps more exhausting than being wild, free, and stupid. That the voice of reason wears out before the insane trolls they would tame, unless there are either sufficient limits to discourse or enough people committed to avoiding certain kinds of unreason.
- I didn’t make an entry last week because I was visiting DC; while there I was thinking about the unusual urban design of DC (where the main SEC building might be across the street from somebody’s 2-story home built 120 years ago). DC feels very suburban. And maybe there’s a kind of political optics there; DC might work better to placate certain concerns than having a capital in a city like NYC would, because visitors see their hometowns in the place. I wonder if that’s important
- I was recently disturbed to find that the long cultural reach of China extends to policing the actions of their citizens overseas to push for loyalty; the legitimate interest of nations in their citizens when abroad is a complex matter, although I think this kind of thing should be seen as clearly unacceptable:
- This recent IQ2US debate on whether the SAT should be abolished was kind of interesting, but I think my ability to enjoy it was limited somewhat by both of the speakers caring far more about equity than I do; I want educational policy to try to uplift everyone reasonably far from where they initially were, but I’m not that interested in equalising their destination. Both debators here were and talked about it constantly:
Current Events
- Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine continues, with Ukraine slowly regaining lost territory and Russia continuing to kidnap citizens en masse. Hungary continues to try to play both sides on the conflict, while Russia steps up its use of Iranian drones and Belarusian military assistance.
- Liz Truss’s role as British PM ended, giving her one of the shortest tenures as PM in recent memory; Rishi Sunak (who competed with her to get the role initially) became her successor
- Elon Musk, after months of drama, completed his acquisition of Twitter,. Having done so, he removed a number of executives and signalled that he may reduce headcount across the company. Meanwhile, Europe indicated it may not allow Twitter to relax its content moderation rules, and India announced the formation of a content moderation panel that it would legally empower to overrule Twitter’s policies on content moderation
- Xi Jingping retained his role as general secretary of the Communist Party of China, having one of his predecessors escorted out of the conference that retained him
Reviewlets
- One of our Thursdays is Missing (Thursday Next Novel) - Unlike the earlier books in the series, I had nearly entirely forgotten this one and so the reread feels pretty fresh. I like that the book feels like a spinoff because the main character is different (sort of) for this one.
- Bloody Acquisitions (Fred/Vampire Novel) - The series continues to grow on me, somehow making accounting and law important for the urban fantasy vampire story they’re telling. That’s not easy to do while leaving things approachable, and the worldbuilding is very carefully portioned out so as to leave that enjoyment a continual side to the meals rather than something one gorges on and is done.
- If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe (John Dies at the End Novel) - More enjoyable weirdness. I’m barely started on this one, but having a great time.
Amusements
- History of that super-common T-Rex costume I’ve been seeing at DragonCon (and elsewhere) for the last several years:
- This demonstrates why Leslie Nielsen’s stoneface was important for his style of humour delivery:
- Comic bit by Taika Waititi, whose TV/film career has been very hit-or-miss for me:
Recent Music
- Promised Land - In Strict Confidence - Darkwave with some really cool vocals
- Bloody Pleasures - BlutEngel - And more Darkwave, this one also reminding me of the CrazyBus theme song (which is not really a song but is a musical equivalent of hard drugs)
- Unicorn - Apoptygma Berserk - An old classic
- On My Own - Echoberyl - I’m still trying to decide if I like this band; the backing parts of the song are great, but the vocal part is weirdly written