TheVat

Seems to be spreading. Don Lemon, of the infamous Nikki Haley (51) is past her prime remark, has just been booted by CNN. Wonder where Tucker will tan his testicles now. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/tucker-carlson-end-of-men-testicle-tanning-1338944/

https://knowablemagazine.org/article/food-environment/2023/climate-change-effect-on-plant-nutrients Atmospheric carbon dioxide is at its highest in human history. That’s probably fine for plants like the grasses the hoppers munch. They can turn that atmospheric carbon into carbohydrates and build more plant — in fact, plant biologists once thought all that extra carbon dioxide would simply mean better crop yields. But experiments in crops exposed to high carbon dioxide levels indicate that many food plants contain less of other nutrients than under carbon dioxide concentrations of the past. Several studies find that plants’ levels of nitrogen, for example, have fallen, indicating lower plant protein content. And some studies suggest that plants may also be deficient in phosphorus and other trace elements. The idea that plants grown in today’s carbon dioxide-rich era will contain less of certain other elements — a concept Kaspari categorizes as nutrient dilution — has been well-studied in crop plants. Nutrient dilution in natural ecosystems is less-studied, but scientists have observed it happening in several places, from the woods of Europe to the kelp forests off Southern California. Now researchers like Kaspari are starting to examine the knock-on effects — to see whether herbivores that eat those plants, such as grasshoppers and grazing mammals, are affected....

May need a British --> American translator. I gather the peace sign, when held up backwards in UK, is a rude gesture. Not sure about the image source. Anyway, agree the new payment requirement is crap.

That's good to hear. Perhaps coding skills are retained by doing other tasks employing logic, math, recursion, looping, etc. And so much depends on attention span and level of fascination when first learning a skill. I loved astronomy as a teen, joined a club, and it surprises me how much is retained.

Cognitive skills vary a lot in how much maintenance they need. When young, I read books - and still do so. But if take a break from books, say a month or two, I resume reading easily. If I take such a long break from piano, my playing suffers terribly. Same with chess. Some mental activity involve a lot of intricate tasks and to be any good at the activity you have to stay at the very top of your abilities. (physics and higher math I would guess is like piano, you must keep at it almost daily) Others seem to rest on skills with more shelf life. And almost all skills benefit from attention span, so obsessive personality types generally have an easier path to developing notable cognitive skills. If they are hunter-gatherers, they become good animal trackers or mushroom finders; if they are modern people, they become scientists, musicians, coders, etc.

Let's say full nuclear deterrence is reached by five warheads (of big city erasing megatonnage). Five can take out a major power's capital and four most economically vital cities. That would effectively collapse that nation. How could we at least reach that stage of MAD? It would keep maintaining that condition where WW3 is unthinkable, while reducing the potential to erase the planetary biosphere. E.g. wipe out Washington DC, New York, LA, Chicago, and Houston. USA collapses, but most of our territory would remain habitable and cropland outside of fallout plumes would be sufficient to feed many survivors. Industrial centers would remain, as would NG and petroleum fields, interstate highways and rails, wind turbines on the Great Plains, and refineries in Oklahoma, Kansas, couple other states. As this attack happened, we in turn would fire our five at Russia, taking out Moscow, etc. Both nations would vanish from the world stage, in terms of power and economy, and would spend decades if not centuries simply surviving and catching up, possibly as an aggregate of balkanized regions. The enemies would be, as Moon mentions, reemerging oligarchs using fascist tactics, offering their power to restore order. Balkan states might grow around cities like Atlanta, Denver, Seattle. Anyway, to keep this post from turning into a dystopian novel, back to main question: could just five big bombs apiece be a workable deterrence system?

Pale leaves usually from watering issues. Either under or over watering.

Perhaps a robust firewall between any AGI and the building's circuit breakers would ease some anxiety. (a metaphor, saying AI can only physically control what we allow) The greater danger from an AGI would actually be the danger of human confederates, i.e. those persuaded to enable it and assist some harmful plan. Just as there are fascist turds who follow Trump or Orban, there could be fascist turds who follow Lore (for non-Trekkies, that's the evil cyber-twin of Data, an android Starfleet officer).

Go to Alpha Centauri, 4.25 light years away, at 99.9 percent the speed of light, the journey as observed by an observer on Earth would take a bit more than 4.25 years. On the ship, however, the travel time would be a little more than 60 days. The equivalence between time dilation and Lorentz contraction (linear, in the direction you are traveling) seems to throw people off. On the ship, one could easily imagine one had got to Centauri much faster than light, based on the subjective shipboard time and one's belief that the star is over 4 LY away. But really one has just contracted the intervening space wrt the ship.

Yup. Immune response, analgesia, inflammation, BP, resting heart rate, all respond to increased interaction with people recognized as sympathetic. You could be Paul Kurtz, James Randi, Richard Dawkins, and if a shaman walked into your hospital room and began shaking a gourd full of seeds over your body and chanting, some of your biomarkers would improve. For sure, they would improve more if you had a deep cultural belief in the shaman's methods and healing powers.

ChatGPT, is that you? Howdy!

If Ukraine hadn't signed the Budapest Memorandum they would have nukes and Putin would have been likely deterred from attacking. So, in terms of realpolitik, the baboon approach is valid. In terms of a moral analysis, we get Mack's tightrope problem. Disarming Ukraine in 1994 meant there was no risk it could bare its nuclear fangs and have Russia call its bluff. If they had kept nukes, there would be some risk. It's the risk-loving poker players who sometimes gain power in a country, or a rogue military officer who breaks loose from central command, that make the risk Mack addresses a real one.

I guess they are distinguishing between objective measures of safety and more subjective (clinging to nuclear teddy bears) political forms. Politics has a lot of threat gesturing. Like baboon troupes.

Gould and others offer arguments for phenotypic traits that are neutral. Spandrels are an example. (Gould coined the term, going from the spandrels of San Marco) The human chin. Genady's earlobes. (mine are unusually purposeful) Gould and Richard Lewontin teamed up to make a critique of adaptationism that's pretty persuasive imo.

I liked this. Baby steps away from the cliff. And this was sort of where START was headed. How that treaty can be restored I have no idea. I agree the US didn't really explore the philosophic questions early on the arms race, when asking them could have got us off on a different foot. But there was too much Red Menace hysteria, thanks to Sen. Joe McCarthy and others of his ilk.

However (and your point about the wee fellas I did see) if the Big 5 disarmed (which was the thought experiment I was running) and the UN banned nukes, then we and our allies would be part of the coalition having the ugly task of enforcing the ban. If, say, Pakistan and NK failed to start dismantling their nukes as the rest of the nuclear countries were doing, they would quickly find themselves very unsafe. If the Security Council ever came together on this, the little holdouts would become the turds in the punchbowl. You may say I'm a dreamer.... Someplace like here? https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/10/europe/russia-putin-empire-restoration-endgame-intl-cmd/index.html Or from one of hundreds of other news outlets that have covered Putin's public remarks directly referencing his plans to rebuild the Empire. x-post with @iNow

It is encouraging when someone grasps the essential lie that nuclear weapons make the world safer. Until we can forge some kind of international and binding treaty that reduces then eliminates nukes, no one is safe. Those of us who live near an AFB with a nuclear bomber wing, or GCHQ or a missile field don't so easily enjoy the luxury of imagining we are safe. Even a fairly limited Herman Khan scenario of nuclear war would make current spectres of climate catastrophe, polar melting, PFAS toxicity, plasticmageddon, lethal pandemics, etc look like a few ants at a picnic by comparison. The kids of Generation Z give me some hope because so many of them seem to grasp these realities and their sharing of awareness easily crosses the porous international borders of the web.

I would guess public opinion is strong enough in the US, so the present problem is Russia and China and their being 2/5 of the UN Security Council. If they ever (next blue moon, perhaps) decided to join US, UK, and France on a full disarmament of nukes, then we would probably be well on our way to a solution. An international ban, backed by the Big Five, could maybe be implemented. But only if there was rigorous international monitoring of all fissile materials. The toughest countries to disarm might prove to be ones like Pakistan, Israel, India, and of course you know who. Certain financial supports, especially for Israel, might have to be withdrawn to encourage compliance.

You need either need huge war power or huge economic power to enforce a no-nukes restriction. Ideally both. Another path, if there was a time when a more global coalition could really come together on no nukes, would be for nations to consider the budgeting joys of not maintaining a nuke arsenal. Such arsenals are hideously expensive. Samuel Beckett couldn't have come up with a scenario more absurd than hundreds of billions spent to maintain something you can never use. Conventional modern warfare is absurd enough. Nukes are absurdity cubed. Sell leaders on all the low carbon energy to be had from all that plutonium. More dystopian: A terrible global economic collapse that reduced all nations to poverty could do the job - no one could afford to keep the nuke thing going. Unfortunately such a collapse would likely also mean government incapacity to disassemble the warheads and safely process and secure all that plutonium, so you could have the terrorist nightmare of militant splinter groups raiding ICBM silos and the like.

Respectfully, I have to say that it will be efficacious to implement consensus mechanisms that build through multiple iterations of the feedback system as it cycles through each incremental through-line of various pedagogical tiers as they self-actualize and tesselate through a full plenum of profit algorithms and covariant fact valuations. And thanks for a good laugh!

Matt Davies is a master.

Goodness me, could this be industrial disease?

Well, he IS the Reaper, after all. 😀

Also 1E1*2E2*3E3. Also the sum of the mystery numbers on the American (cult popular) series "Lost." Also the product of the Supreme Court size and the most common jury size (9 and 12). Also, in Hinduism 108 is the sacred number of creation. Also sacred in Buddhism. In Islam it's the number associated with Allah. You get the idea. (there was also the frequent noticing of $1.08 in coins in my pocket, a digital clock happening to read 1:08, etc) Type "significance of 108" in a search engine and you will be drenched in mystical connections and mathematic elegance. It's an absolute turbocharger for association chaining.

Plus one - fascinating. The human mind is particularly adept at pattern recognition, useful for animal tracking or hunting for edible plants or seeing a potential enemy hiding in a bush, less useful when working overtime in a world full of symbol systems - letters, numbers, logos, etc. Many logical fallacies and statistical fallacies (and pareidolia) arise from such over-application of pattern recognition. (I often am reminded of one called The Texas Sharpshooter, which also seems common among crackpots) I have wondered if astrology buffs also have a tendency to association chaining - it's sort of a conspiracy theory involving celestial objects and Greek/Roman god names mystically applied to them, with spurious connections constantly being drawn and reinforced by very selective observations of persons. I wonder how rates of belief in astrology correlates with rates of Q-anon beliefs. On a personal note, I once let this cognitive tendency go a little overboard on the number 108. (I let it happen on purpose, curious what would happen) That number was everywhere. Once I even saw it lurking, big brass letters on the side of a house, behind an EVERGREEN tree.