aethertap

Bootstrapping the reeducation of enough people to effectively get them intensive-gardening in that kind of a situation would be a massive challenge, but if enough people did the feed-your-neighbors preparedness approach we might have enough time to get it done. If we were looking at a long-term scenario I think I'd want to have at least a year of grace period to get people rolling. Thinking back to all the mistakes I made starting my own farm, if my life had been depending on success I'd most likely be dead, or would have survived solely by eating my sheep...

Cuba is an interesting example of a place that had to rapidly adopt a low-power lifestyle, and they actually seem to have done it with grace. There might be a good case there to study for clues about what works. They have the advantage of not having to contend with long, cold winters though, which is a critical difference for most of North America.

I think you're right that guns are probably a necessity to some extent, but I would rather spend the money on feeding my neighbors as much as possible rather than fighting them. I ran some quick numbers on webstaurantsupply.com, and for a simple "donut diet"[1] you can feed 100 people 1800 kCal/day for nearly a month for $1000 (the price of a decent quality rifle where I live).

I've been trying to work out a way to organize neighborhood-level basic essentials storages on the cheap, so that people in that kind of situation can afford to take care of themselves until the power comes back on. Food is pretty easy, but water and sanitation are a bit more problematic so far.

[1] - just calories to make it over the hump, this is not health food. Ingredients are white flour, white sugar, vegetable oil, and some white rice for the people who can't do the wheat products. Add vitamin pills to prevent deficiency diseases and you can stay functional for a long time at about $0.30/day.

This came up today and reminded me of this thread so I thought I'd post it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7957057

I would just add that the mind probably is partially an outgrowth of the entire connected body system rather than just the brain in isolation. The feedbacks between the hormonal system, parasympathetic/sympathetic nervous system, and various other influences in the body have definite effects on the function of the mind, assuming that mind encompasses behavior.

There's a fascinating course on this topic available from The Great Courses:

http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.asp...

Family of four, twenty acres. I custom graze cattle and raise ducks and fruit and nut trees, and keep a large garden.

I own a farm, and work on it every day with my family, so yes, I do have personal experience with it. It turns out that working together on something you value seems to build relationships, at least in our case.

There's more to food than nutrition. The process of growing, preparing, and eating food has been a major source of social connection and "quality time," which is in my opinion the most significant value of slow food for well-being. You can get the nutrition you need with a pittance today in terms of economics, but as a society I think we've failed to fill the social gap that was left open by our liberation from the work of eating well. I'm not saying that the gap has to be filled by food (there are probably even better things we could do), just that the slow food movement is using it that way. Filling it with productive work as you describe certainly has economic value, but I think the cost in terms of happiness for some of us kills the reward.

Here are some highlights that caught my attention from the article (tl;dr):

Imaging the brain first, to target the stimulation to the active region:

"The MRN team used this software in part of their DARPA-funded research. First, they imaged volunteers’ brains to see which regions were active as they learned to spot threats. Then they applied 2 milliamps of direct current for 30 minutes to that crucial region – the inferior frontal cortex. They found that stimulation halved the time it took volunteers to learn. This was a huge surprise, says Clark. “Most tDCS studies don’t achieve a huge effect. A lot are borderline.”

This is one of the criticisms that has been levelled at tDCS: the results aren’t always that good. Clark is convinced this is because a lot of the studies haven’t involved imaging the brain first, to pinpoint the regions that really need stimulation. “A lot rely on common knowledge about how the brain is meant to be organised. I’ve learned in 33 years of looking at the brain that we still have a lot to learn,” he says. Michael Weisend, who collaborated on the study, agrees – he calls the imaging work “the secret sauce”."

Using both excitatory and inhibitory stimulation to increase the effectiveness of training:

"Brain imaging suggested that the best way to do this would be to stimulate the motor cortex while the volunteer was doing the task. But McKinley and his team added a twist: after the stimulation, they use tDCS in reverse to inhibit the volunteers’ prefrontal cortex, which is involved in conscious thinking. The day after the stimulation, the volunteers are brought back for re-testing. “The results we’re getting are fantastic,” McKinley says. People getting a hit of both mid-test and inhibitory stimulation did 250 per cent better in their retests, far outperforming those who had received neither. Used in this way, it seems that tDCS can turbo-boost the time it takes for someone to go from being a novice at a task to being an expert."

Side-effects seem to be absent from evidence up to this point:

"So far, there seem to be no harmful effects of tDCS, at least, not at the levels or durations of stimulation that are routinely used. Weisend believes there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and admits there could be side-effects to tDCS that no one knows about yet."

Can you explain your reasoning behind that goal? It doesn't seem like something I'd want, but I'm not a great marketer so I'm curious what you'll gain from it.

> I wonder why the decline in one and not the other? It seems pesticides would affect them both

I think the difference probably comes from the practice of transporting domestic bees to large orchards and vegetable fields for pollination services, where their diet is almost exclusively limited to agricultural products (which are sprayed).

Thanks for that link, it looks like it'll make for some fascinating watching.

One of the things that I think would be essential for an effort like this is a reference that describes the pivotal experiments and resulting insights that led us to our current level of scientific knowledge. To me, those accumulated inductive leaps of genius or luck are the real inheritance of our civilization.

Does anyone know if this book dives into that, or if not is there any other prepackaged "this is how science got here" kind of resource out there?

I used it with a small embedded system a couple of years ago and was generally very pleased with it, at least from an ease of use perspective. For the niche I was filling it was a great fit. I don't know how well it adheres to the standard though, or whether it has known vulnerabilities.

I think this is very dependent on what you're actually doing. I'm involved in an attempt to bring some more sustainable/regenerative methods and technology to agriculture, and in that space I'm glad to see anybody show up who's doing the same. I don't have competitors (in my view), because I have a gigantic task in front of me and my main concern is to see that it gets done (even though I'm trying to make money on it at the same time). I go out of my way to help other people who are trying to make a buck in my space.

On the other hand, if you're selling a commodity (e.g. gasoline), then it's pretty hard to say that the guy across the street isn't competition. Perhaps there's a spectrum of appropriateness for cooperation/competition between these two extremes?

This is really clever, and I'm definitely going to give it a workout on my system. Thanks!

I'm probably a bit out of my depth here, but maybe somebody else can jump in and set me straight. Regarding point (1), I think that may be mostly solved by conservation of energy if the vehicle is large compared to its payload. The reason is that, as it climbs, it will have to be accelerated to orbital velocity (I'm assuming this will be done by the cable itself, or more accurately the mass at the end that keeps it in tension). It will then drop its payload, and climb back down. During the climb down, the cable will have to decelerate the climber back to surface velocity, so the energy that went into speeding it up on the climb will be mostly recovered on the way back down.

So it seems like the cable would sway backward as it lifts the climber, and be pushed forward almost as far when the climber descends again. If the mass at the end of the cable included some kind of constant low-grade thrust, maybe you could bank up angular momentum between runs to account for the mass of the payloads.

I'd love it if someone with more physics background could weigh in on it though.

> What I would like to know is if those not eating high-fat dairy compensate with high-carbs dairy.

That's an interesting point. I have noticed that a lot of low-fat foods in the store seem to try to compensate for flavor losses by adding sugar. Totally non-scientific observation, but I wonder if there's something more to it.

I'm going through a similar process right now and something that's helping me a lot is the advice in The Now Habit. It's a quick read, and at least in my case the advice is effective and sustainable.

() http://amzn.com/1585425524

Regarding the prevalence of GA, I've been experimenting with self-hosting analytics on my own domains using piwik [1]. So far, I'm pretty pleased with it and I feel somewhat better knowing that my users' data doesn't go to any third parties.

It does everything I want it to do (so far), but I'm not an analytics power user by any means.

[1] - http://piwik.org/

I think you can use voodoo in two ways: "Impossibly arcane but near-magical technology" or "total crap."

I have been researching this for a couple of years and can recommend a couple of books that I thought were particularly good:

* Good questions for math teaching (http://amzn.com/0941355519)

* Young Mathematicians at Work (http://amzn.com/032500353X)

* Number Sense Routines (http://amzn.com/1571107908)

* Dr Wright's Kitchen Table Math book (there are three) - http://amzn.com/0982921128

I haven't finished these next two, but they look promising:

* Fostering Geometric Thinking (http://amzn.com/0325011486)

* Fostering Algebraic Thinking (http://amzn.com/0325001545)

I also like the approach of the Art of Problem Solving curriculum, though it doesn't currently have elementary school material. I haven't used it on my own kids yet because they're still too young, but I did buy the set and I think it looks good. If you read "Good Questions for Math Teaching" you will probably modify the way the problems are presented to make them more open-ended, but I like that topics are introduced with a problem that is later explained, instead of explaining then drilling.

http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Store/curriculum.php

Finally, I thought that this online course was a nice introduction to the approach. It's a pretty short course, but I just put the audio on an mp3 player so I could listen while working on other things and there were only a couple of places where I couldn't tell what was happening in the video.

* https://class.stanford.edu/courses/Education/EDUC115N/How_to...

For a more general book about early childhood education, I really liked

* "Engaging Children's Minds - the Project Approach" (http://amzn.com/1567505015)

* Making Thinking Visible (http://amzn.com/047091551X)

* Learning Intelligence: Cognitive acceleration...(http://amzn.com/0335211364)

Sadly, most of these books are pretty pricey for the page count, but the material I thought was quite good. If you were to get only two, I'd say go with "Young Mathematicians at Work" and "Good Questions for Math Teaching" because they will probably give you the quickest jump start, especially if you can get the "How to Learn Math" course.

If you're interested in where my evidence for the approach outlined here comes from, my main sources are the following books:

* Effectiveness In Learning (cognitive load theory) http://amzn.com/0787977284

* Visible Learning (synthesis of 800 meta-analyses) - http://amzn.com/0415476186

Edited because I put some of them in the wrong spots and forgot links...

> and I'd sit there wanting to shout "NO, NO it's not obvious!"

Toward the end of my degree program, I became the annoying guy in class who would do exactly that. I remember one time in particular (I think the topic was something on wavelets, which I barely remember now anyway) when I stopped the professor and said "Can you explain all of that over again, from the beginning?"

Worked great for me, but I'm not sure what the rest of the class thought of it. At the time I just assumed they were as lost as me and would appreciate it, but that may well have not been the case.

I've been enjoying this series from MIT OCW on Gödel, Escher, Bach:

http://ocw.mit.edu/high-school/humanities-and-social-science...

If you have a javascript console handy, this helped for me:

document.getElementsByClassName('content')[0].style.font="14pt arial bold"

If you have the financial resources to do it, I'd recommend spending some time exploring other parts of business and computer science. There are some really great free resources out there for learning (coursera, udacity, etc.). The reason I say that is that having some solid fundamentals will give you more flexibility in terms of what you can do, and it'll also let you try some other potential career paths on for size.

If you can spend a couple of years at the start building breadth in your skill base, you'll be able to gracefully adapt to changes in your lifestyle, the online market situation, and other things that come up. I know a couple of guys who jumped in full bore kind of like it sounds like you're talking about, and they eventually found themselves pigeonholed into a single career for their whole lives, because as life went on their obligations accumulated to the point where they could no longer afford the interruption in income that a career change would mean (because they would have to learn basically everything over again). So, if you can keep your expenses minimal and pay them with your freelancing work, I'd say just try to get some foundational business management and computer science knowledge under your belt.

As far as what tech/language/etc will give you the best bang for the buck in today's freelancing market I have no idea. Regardless of that though, I'd say that learning Internet marketing seems like the most important thing you can do to ensure success. This is something I failed to understand at the start and I'm paying for it now.

Wow, thank you for that list. My daughter is going to love this...

I share your concerns about long term viability as well (and I download everything). I really want to see them succeed though...

I've been thinking that a viable model that would keep courses free might be to use a kickstarter crowdfunding model to launch a course offering. If I did it, I'd set it up so that the threshold was high enough to make sure that the course was profitable, then make the course available to contributors first (and they'd get certificates), after which it would be freely available to anybody who wants to take it. You'd have to work out how to do the advertising efficiently so that it didn't eat your time and profits, which is probably a huge problem with the idea. Personally, I'd happily contribute to something like that on a regular basis though.

Periodic relaunches could also be set up for certificate track stuff. You'd get the professor back in to answer questions and all that, but the video content could be left the same so it should be much less expensive to operate existing courses.

openculture.com also has a huge list (725 courses according to their title) of free online courses in a variety of subjects.

http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses

Agreed, at least from my brief description, which was a summary of a summary out of a book. I'd say it's more likely that it's my own retelling that's flawed, though I haven't read the actual study. They also didn't have a group which was given the same number of calories from a different source (as far as I know) so it's possible that eating a chunk of meat would have the same effect. What I thought was interesting actually was that they were able to demonstrate beneficial effects from intake of calories directly on brain function.

As I wrote that, I did remember a bit of evidence that the glucose was actually beneficial - namely that they measured performance on the problems over time. At the end of the first set, both groups were showing approximately equal degraded performance. Upon resuming on the second set, the group given glucose was back up to nearly the starting level of proficiency, while the group given no glucose was at the same level they stopped at on the first group.

I read about some research* regarding ego depletion and its relationship to blood glucose levels that was pretty interesting. Basically, they did a study with two groups of people. Both were asked to do some challenging problems requiring concentration, then both were given lemonade. One group's lemonade was sweetened with glucose, and the other with some artificial sweetener. The two groups were then asked to do more challenging problems. I can't recall the actual numbers, but the group that had glucose in their lemonade did significantly better on the second round than the other group, and the two groups were about the same on the first round.

The implication was that the brain uses glucose in its operation, and requires a certain level of glucose to function at full capacity. At least one cause of the brain fog we get after a full day's focused work is that we're low on fuel, which happens to be easy to fix. Unfortunately, it has other effects too that we might not want so much. I've been meaning to experiment on myself a bit with some glucose tabs after a long day of code, but haven't gotten around to it yet.

(*) I think that was in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" but I'm not certain now, too many similar books in between.