2023-04-08
Readings
A really weird genetic find: a certain ant species has chimerism (individuals have multiple active sets of genetics) in all its males. This kind of thing is a rare quirk in other species (including humans); this is the first known instance of a species making it mandatory (for one of its genders, anyhow): https://phys.org/news/2023-04-yellow-crazy-ant-males-dna.html
As a reminder (for me, anyhow) that communities we’re not paying a lot of attention to have their own interesting struggles; this is a weird meeting of IP law and Roman Catholic Canon Law: https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/253895/canon-law-copyright-case-priests-website-stays-online-thanks-to-new-translation
Efforts towards treating a common (and currently untreatable) form of brain cancer in humans: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-04-leverage-cell-self-destruction-brain-tumors.html
Interesting coverage of the idea of the place of artists in public consciousness:
Interesting how with slightly different grammatical structures, Japanese has its first-person pronoun “I” act as something deeply expressive (I took some Japanese in high school, and found the amount of meaning in the language tied to status to be a bit intimidating):
A dive into the clever way Amazon sidestepped the normal slow parts of the US Patent System (A lot of what Amazon does should probably not be permitted, most importantly here, running a marketplace while selling products in it while perpetually finding ways to edge companies that sell stuff there out and replacing it with their own products):
Thoughts
A few thoughts on Pratchett/Baxter’s “Long Earth” as I work through it:
How many people would leave?
How much does a society depend on scarcity of routes-to-leave and similarity of destinations?
Does the whole situation create a possibility/worry of a Mongol-horde situation, where a mobile invasive civilisation would overrun everything? What are the general civilisational patterns of security?
Piers Anthony is an author I liked when I was young but whom I now find very difficult to reread; it feels like dated juvenile humour and approaches to sexuality. It was still full of interesting ideas; one that my thoughts return to often is an imagined world where people are under a mild enchantment at what looks like a great feast to them, eating marvelous foods, when in reality they’re eating things less desirable and more disgusting than pig slop. This was an early introduction, as I parsed it, to doubting one’s senses, in particular the idea that one may be being manipulated to sense things in a twisted way to what they are. And the possible impenetrable nature of illusions of that sort. Could we be under such illusions continually? And what of people with mild mental/social illness who see a slightly different world than the rest of us presumably do? Is there any escaping the insides of boxes such as those? It’s fair to swagger up and suggest one wouldn’t be fooled, somehow, but this feels hollow without a mechanism. Later the possible similarity of these things to framings became disturbing
I’m interested in the approaches to homelessness that Japan takes as outlined in this video; some of them seem overboard (one can’t always blame the homeless for their status, and it’s more important to build routes out of that state and get people onto those routes), some of them seem pretty decent (in particular, the cybercafes). It seems, as a whole, better than what we see in the US.
Current Events
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, with little shift in control lines, and continued bombardment of Ukrainian civilians in various cities. Ukraine’s control of its power grid is sufficient for it to resume exporting electricity westward, while western businesses continue to pull out from Russia
A number of elections, with center-right gains in Finland and Bulgaria, and a centrist win in Montenegro (also Andorra, but Andorra doesn’t matter)
Related, Finand joined NATO
The Israeli pause on judicial reforms has not toned down protests, which are continuing to escalate as Bibi’s far-right coalition and the rest of the country pulling on the administration in various ways
China has been doing military exercises with the aim of gaming encirclement of Taiwan, presumably as practice for an invasion
After some violence at The Temple, Israel and its neighbours (and the Palestinians) re-entered their state of low-grade military violence
Reviewlets
The World’s Worst Assistant (memoirs) - This is by Sona Movsesian, who was Conan O’Brien’s assistant. The tone reminds me of Jason Pargin’s “John Dies at the End” urban fantasy novels, the content a mix of hollywood tell-all (which I’d ordinarily find dull) and someone trying to make sense of their life (which is more interesting). I thought this would be some light filler, and it’s a little (not a lot) more than that
Cyberpunk: Trauma Team - Somehow in my last entry I omitted the actual review; reading this one hurt, but in an interesting way. A lot of character depth was unlikely given the format, but as a whole it still manages to show how humans often don’t fit in well to social organisations that alienate them too far from sustainable ethical frameworks. It makes me feel better about how modern medical ethics work (not that I was ever particularly harsh on that).
Amusements
Some good April fools from CERN: https://home.cern/news/news/cern/time-change-cern-scientists-propose-25-hour-day
A tour of the Scott South Pole Station:
Weird that Wellington has personal cable cars to get to homes (that’s a lot of infrastructure to build):
Both amusing and awesome, I ordered one of these gear-based-pseudo-electricity kits:
I like to dive in on one explanation explored in this (namely, the border-of-the-map issue), but it’s interesting to see how mapping the world used to be handled with this mapping-Korea problem (I wonder if one might have asked the people who lived there though):
Recent Music
Rivers is a Vampire - Bear Ghost - Bold like music should be. Eclectic. I hope this song holds up after a lost of relistening, because it’s a fun grab-bag of ideas that mostly work together
Modern Love - All Time Low - Makes really good use of time signature changes, and I’m a sucker for rounds, which they use a bit in later parts of the song
Higher Ground - Stevie Wonder - This might be a perfect song. The backing has an interesting beat that his voice then plays off of superbly.