Thanks for the correction, I remembered it wrong.
From his blog:
>[...]Eine ganz besondere Zugfahrt zum nördlichsten Bahnhof Europas, Narvik.
>A very special train journey to the northernmost railroad station in Europe, Narvik. [0]
1,108 karma · joined November 21, 2020
From his blog:
>[...]Eine ganz besondere Zugfahrt zum nördlichsten Bahnhof Europas, Narvik.
>A very special train journey to the northernmost railroad station in Europe, Narvik. [0]
Seems a very cautious guy, as he was booking a night train from Budapest to Bucharest, apparently he was warned at the counter by an employee which made him very uneasy. Reminds of the story of that TEDx talk.[1]
He is clearly enjoying it so I hope the positive experiences encourage him to even go beyond Europe, like to India ;) [2]
[0]https://leben-im-zug.de/mein-jahresrueckblick-2023/
So, granted Dehomag[0] was only an IBM subsidiary, there is some evidence that IBM's US-headquarter was well informed and decided do not forgo the excellent business relationship and thus large profits (funneled through Switzerland).[1][2]
However the case might be here, it is nevertheless a cautionary tale how the ease of mass data collection can immensely leverage (bad) intent.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehomag
[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/mar/29/humanities.hig...
[2]https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0609607995/theameric...
>In general when using an algorithmic approach to identify clusters of points in a distribution, one must employ some criterion in order to decide whether the results obtained correspond to ‘real’ structures in the Universe, or are merely artefacts of the algorithm. One possible criterion is theoretical: if there is a good reason to believe that the points in the cluster are in fact gravitationally bound, for instance, or if its properties match those of structures that are expected to exist in the real Universe, it may be regarded as real. Alternatively, to assess unusual clusters which do not conform to theoretical expectation, the relevant criterion is whether they are unlikely to have arisen purely from noise.
Since the linkage length used to identify the Huge-LQG is so large, there is no reason I know of to believe that it forms a gravitationally bound structure. Certainly no real structures of such size are expected in the standard cosmology. On the other hand, when using this linkage length the clustering algorithm often finds such extended structures even in pure Poisson noise. It therefore appears that the Huge-LQG fails to satisfy either criterion, and so its interpretation as a ‘structure’ is highly questionable. This conclusion is even more applicable to the other slightly smaller quasar groups whose existence has also been claimed.
>In this variation of Chinese mythology, there are 12,800 hells located under the earth – eight dark hells, eight cold hells and 84,000 miscellaneous hells located at the edge of the universe. All will go to Diyu after death but the period of time one spends in Diyu is not forever – it depends on the severity of the sins one committed. After receiving due punishment, one will eventually be sent for reincarnation. Diyu is divided into ten courts, each overseen by a Yanwang. Souls pass from stage to stage at the decision of a different judge
Indeed very much useless!
From a psychopathic view he got a really good setup:
(1) active policeman (2) cultural differences to wash the line between appropriate and inappropriate (3) young woman from far away globetrotting with little experience just staying few nights (4) over the top hospitality (5) sleeping over in his own home + tranquilizers
>(“You’re 21 and sleep in someone’s house for free? You get drunk in his house and blame the host?”)
What caught him was the usual over-confidence chasing the ever bigger high:
>Maglio was finally arrested, for another attack. An Australian woman with two daughters had been staying with him, and woken in the early hours to find her 16-year-old in bed with Maglio. She’d been drugged and was non-responsive for five hours. Incredibly, while Maglio was under house arrest for this incident, the police visited and found two new suitcases in his hallway, and two couch surfers in his living room – one with benzodiazepines in her system.
One way is to multi-verse out of it another is to recognize the limitations of that methodology.
While in principle you get to keep your methodology in the first approach, by definition you are now also left with unobservable phenomena flirting with the platonic world.
In the same vein reflecting about the methodology also enters the realm of philosophy. But imho in a more honest way by calling out the default, construct another and get back into physics.
A lot of platonic thinking prevalent in mathematics and physics isn't overtly discussed, mostly out of convenience as one mathematician put it: in my workdays I'm a Platonist and on my weekends I can also afford to be an Intuitionist.
So, obviously Hitler and his military advisors were well aware of the huge risk, nonetheless they took it.
The explanation given in the recording (Who could have known that they could have produced over 35.000 tanks? Of which we have destroyed 34.000.) is an obvious exaggeration (the total number of all armored fighting vehicles was around 25.000 [2] at the time of the invasion) to deflect from major failures in strategic considerations e.g. underestimating the ruthless adaptability of the Soviets given their gigantic resources of land, oil and fighting men.
Because it is only when the Soviets got invaded they really began to ramp up the production of the legendary T-34 (from 3000 in 1941 to 15.000/year (!) until the end of the war in 1945) and their vast geography helped them to relocate more than half of the production sites from the West to the Ural Mountains way out of the reach for the Germans. So, the Blitzkrieg which worked brilliantly in Western & Central Europe got stuck at Stalingrad into a slow grind. Resulting into the broadest land front in military history with about 10 million military deaths on the Soviet side and about 5 million on the German/Axis side.[3]
Again, why the high risk? The necessity to secure oil fields?[4] Yes, but only paired with the pathological paranoia towards anything "bolshevik" as is evident in the recording. So the recording is not only superficially remarkable as we hear Hitler's normal voice but also quite revealing about the rationalization taking place at a crucial point on the Eastern Front in 1942.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_European_Plain
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_invasion_of_Russia
[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_combat_vehicle_produc...
[3]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II)
>when it is [relatively] cheap to believe something (even when it is wrong) it is rational to believe it.
"Engineering" (manipulation of the environment) is the most intuitive for humans to sort out irrational beliefs.
"Science" is a method of eliminating human bias (preconceived notions) beforehand as much as possible as to maximize the space of possibilities in terms of technology ("knowledge").
"Anarchy" in the realm of social order in its most basic form minimizes the abuse of power of the few by optimizing structures of hierarchical order.
Every single one of the human enterprises is non-telic, a constant work in progress. My sense is that through its accelerated atomized structure and loss of power "the West" has lost itself in delusions and constant anxiety resulting in disproportionate numbers of megalomaniac leaders free of account and apathetic citizens giving up agency.
Everyone wants to live in "interesting times" but no one wants to live through it with one lifeline and a 52.5% chance of belonging to the bottom 1.2% in terms of credit points (wealth) and dependent on highly corrupt structures. I surely wouldn't play that game, so what do I care what my rational beliefs are (no participation) as long as every belief I fancy has an underlying cynicism it is a far effective short-term strategy to avoid being "scammed" which could potentially cost the lifeline.
I assume the most common and potentially hurtful "ghosting" coincides with the ubiquitous use of dating apps, so I will focus on that.
Though it is possible to "ignore"/"ghost" someone you dated which you got to know from workplace, through mutual friends or through a regular activity you share (art, sport, church ...), it also may cost you because you have to potentially quit your job, lose some friends or find another place for your hobby. The club/bar/socially going out thing is a bit of a grey zone because the probability of someone looking for a "one-night stand" is pretty high which is normally regulated by giving a clear rejection or risking to suffer a rebuff.
Online dating changes the game field because without a social environment and therefore potential considerable personal cost (in the example above: the husband "ghosting" his pregnant wife would have gone through the lengths to leave his belongings, house, common friends, family members, the city, the state ...) ghosting is a very attractive strategy, the psychological consequences - as described in the article - you only tend to feel later and as a repeated ghostee you also start at some point to feel entitled to ghost in this sterile digital environment, too --> positive feedback loop.
As with the club context ("one night stand") in online dating "ghosting" is to be expected, I would reckon for a lot of people a hefty price for the ultra-convenience, they didn't fully consider when going in.
...
>Ghosters are just doing what good capitalists do, except within the domain of interpersonal relations: maximize the bottom line of personal gain without letting empathy, compassion, or kindness get too much in the way. If a partner must be “fired” because their “performance” is inadequate, then so be it. Nothing personal, it’s just business.
It boils down to social regulations as applied above. "Corporate capitalism" with elaborate mechanisms (in tandem with dozens of specialized law firms) to maximally "diffuse responsibilities". Yes. But I don't think in companies in which the boss knows his employees and their families. That is a very different talk.
Indeed, at some point conjuring up the dark triad is inevitable. But that's another highly loaded discussion and while it is a serious problem in the scale of our modern societies, it's often used as a boogeyman/strawman in isolated contexts to deflect from the enabling circumstances which are uncomfortable to acknowledge.
Yes, Robert Malone could be seen as initiating the journey in 1987 [0] but there are a lot of landmark contributors who refined it to the mass-produced mRNA platform of today.
As with other Nobel Prizes, it is a far outdated award of the late 19th/early 20th century in which honoring single individuals made some sense.
In today's scientific enterprise the high-frequent collaborative effort of different teams all over the world is the norm, so over time it becomes pretty hard to single out individual scientists.
The prize winners of today are just widely recognized representatives (and therefore mostly older folks) of a particular successful scientific endeavor so that the public can still relate to the achievements via a personal story what would be otherwise a history lesson involving a lot of important people - and in this case I think Karikó's extraordinary perseverance throughout her science career fits this bill very well without ruffling up some too many feathers.
Walter Freeman coined the term "surgically induced childhood" and used it constantly to refer to the results of lobotomy. The operation left people with an "infantile personality"; a period of maturation would then, according to Freeman, lead to recovery. In an unpublished memoir, he described how the "personality of the patient was changed in some way in the hope of rendering him more amenable to the social pressures under which he is supposed to exist." He described one 29-year-old woman as being, following lobotomy, a "smiling, lazy and satisfactory patient with the personality of an oyster" who could not remember Freeman's name and endlessly poured coffee from an empty pot. When her parents had difficulty dealing with her behaviour, Freeman advised a system of rewards (ice cream) and punishment (smacks).
But the greatest impact would be lifestyle changes in general. You cannot just diet your way out of a heart disease.
Well, maybe this population [0] of subsistence farmers will give you a hint.
In the modern world it is an uphill battle. And there are some people with hypocholesterolemia [1] who will have arteries in near pristine condition despite living a modern (unhealthy) lifestyle.
There are two broad strategies here which can be combined:
(1) Adhering to (strict) rules which will consume your resource of willpower. A very effective one: Don't drink sugary drinks. An unconvenient one for most people: Don't eat out.
(2) Modifying your modern environment to such an extent that it resemble choices humans made before the modern lifestyle i.e. a lot of physical activity, offline times, no processed food, being outdoors (e.g. a garden). To reap the benefits from both a modern lifestyle and a lifestyle we are evolutionary adapted to, this of course will cost you money in a crowded city and (unpaid) time you would otherwise use for earning money.
[0]https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97803...
But the judge shouldn't be completely oblivious of Alphabet's past history and its role as a "key market player" and just taking the claims at face value.
The argumentation doesn't sound very balanced tbh. More like: that's way above my league and I don't want to be the one jeopardizing national security, so I have to trust you on that.
In a sense, this is an admission that Alphabet is way too "big" already to be treated as an "ordinary company" which makes a due process a more complicated matter, euphemistically speaking. And I get that but as the substack article points out: atm right from the start it plays out way too far on Alphabet's terms.
That's the way I read it, I might be wrong.
Wait. What? An "anti-trust" trial against one of the five trillion dollar company in the world abusing its monopoly power is taken seriously on its claim it could cause "competitive harm"? Catch 22.
I guess the competitive harm is political in nature. The real competition seems to be China. The rationalization one of being a "strong" united front against an authoritarian system. So, the judicial system needs to subordinate itself to that power constellation. Ultimately succumbing to the authoritarian logic.
By excluding the public in order to not produce "clickbait" just furthers the growing mistrust in institutions which then in turn necessitates more "secrecy" as to not to "confuse" the public ...
This mindset exemplified by the likes of Eric Schmidt reminds me of Edward Teller's role in the nuclear arms race. Surely, brilliant people with a lot of valuable input but I wouldn't fully trust their judgment.
Because I'm not distracted by mental images popping up, its only a function of slowly watching your thoughts pass by in complete blackness (normal for me). When talking to fellow meditators without aphantasia I feel it makes it easier for me (once I learned not to control those images) to enter those stages quicker and more reliably by taking a shortcut through the realm of visual blackness ;)
Since I don't know how it is to be able to conjure up mental images at will in the ordinary state of mind I tend to be more verbose and exact in describing my experiences to others who in turn can be more easily triggered by that - I suspect through the help of their mental images now popping up. I find it fascinating that I can literally evoke elaborate pictures in most people minds by just talking to them with attention to more detail (which I can only abstractly conceptualize).
But I observed the same thing later in high school when I got up on time but forgot to buy milk and hence went to school fasted.
Back then, I thought "break(ing your)fast" was somehow important for your energy levels at the start of the day (good PR!) so I was hesitant to follow really through and I guess the latent sugar cravings did the rest (but I remember not being "hangry" as others described it).
Now, after experimenting with a lot of regiments, I know that I'm far better off by "skipping breakfast". As a general rule of thumb giving your body a rest time of 12 hours and not eating 2 hours before sleeping gives your body an additional strong signal for its diurnal coordination.
That being said I knew a very athletic guy who before sleeping devoured 3000kcal (he barely ate throughout the day) and then judging by his exceptional body composition and athletic achievements could recover excellently.
However, the reward structure of overconfidence can be used to maintain the momentum and once you hit the hard wall of insurmountable incompetence congratulate yourself that you actually walked the path of knowing practically nothing.
It's the hardest thing to fully admit one's own ignorance and easy to see all around you, it's only when the giant rationalization machine buzzing inside is finally fully exhausted; for a brief moment the crushing vastness of the unknown pours in.
So in a way overconfidence is just unused fuel. Use it wisely.
Alas, it's about the unintended dangers of ever sophisticated and fully automated tool use. Is this satire?
Yeah, something heavy on wheels can roll you over, crush you and kill you.
I'm not trying to dismiss any safety regulation but isn't the big elephant in the room one of the main driver of all technology: military use?
Maybe most people gave up on that and try to focus on things in the civilian sphere that they can potentially impact. A "healthy" compartmentalization of sorts.
But for me the contrast is so stark that the examples mentioned in the article are unintentionally comical and forced, even if the underlying questions valid and transferable to military use.
If one studies the price revolution [0] in Europe mainly taking place during the Spanish Golden century ("Siglo Oro") the statement: [...]access to unlimited quantities of a universal medium of exchange, craved and accepted everywhere at best just forces an analogy but in reality the "Spanish elite" weren't even near it.
America's silver (and to some extend gold) pouring into Western Europe was just one aspect of financial power but without adequate instruments like (1) safe enough infrastructure to protect against piracy, (2) appropriate financial instruments and (3) a solid framework of economics (academic institutions like the "School of Salamanca"[1] could just barely keep up, offered some new insights but ultimately those were tragically forgotten after the fast decline) the "new wealth" couldn't be properly utilized and leveraged. In the end both France and Spain had to declare state bankruptcy over their costly wars to their respective wealthy merchants sitting in cities like Antwerpen. France then emerged as the new center of power in Europe.
The "financial innovations" were mostly driven by the merchant class in the Low Countries who had freedom to establish their own judicial system regarding trade and loans, those were slowly adapted by the Netherlands and later by England.
Jakob Fugger is prime example [2] of that class at that time in Europe having built a monopoly on copper mining, he went on to establish new silver mining techniques in the wake of the Great Bullion Famine. In 1527 - at his peak - Jakob Fugger resided over 2,800,000 Florins about 2% Europe's GDP at that time or in today's standard an estimated $400 billon fortunate. He was also instrumental into securing a gigantic loan of of about 100,000 ounces of gold for Charles I later becoming the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.
[0]https://eh.net/book_reviews/american-treasure-and-the-price-...
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Salamanca#Economic...
My favourite example of a "Guess culture" is that of Iranian taarof[0]:
Another example occurs if a Western individual is not familiar with taarof in Iranian culture. When an Iranian individual is offering taarof, it is to first view it as a sincere offer with the hope of decline up to four or five times. If the individual offers more than five times, it can be concluded that the individual is not doing taarof, and the opposite side should respectfully thank that individual and accept the offer with gratitude.
In that example one has to decline about 5 times (!) to be sure the offer is genuine, most people unfamiliar with that custom will take the offer the second or third time or will be enraged that they don't understand a "No, thank you".
The most laborious combination is a "genuine offer" and you deciding to decline it. The person signaling the genuine offer will try to double down, - so expect an 8th time - until your genuine rejection is "accepted" and while you are at it firmly holding your ground try to sneak in a counter-offer, too ;) In the end you will end up most likely accepting a "symbolic offer" of the genuine offer. E.g. if you decline a ride you are offered genuinely (say because you want to have a comfortable ride with a taxi), you can decline eventually by accepting the symbolic offer that e.g. a taxi is called up for you.
Pretty hard to figure out if you are coming from an ask culture.
“Humanity’s main problem is luxury carbon and biosphere consumption, not population. The places where population is rising fastest have extremely small environmental footprints per person compared with the places that reached peak population many decades ago.” said Jorgen Randers, one of leading modelers for Earth4All and co-author of The Limits to Growth.
Btw world's richest 10% among the world's adult population (~ 5.2bn) means a net worth of about only $140.000; defined as “the value of financial assets plus real assets (principally housing) owned by households, minus their debts.”[0]
So, Jørgen Randers talks - almost exclusively - about the middle class in developed nations.
If one follows the 90/10 distribution through:
The threshold in being included to the top 1% is at about $1.15m. Or seen from the $1m landmark there are about 62.5m adult millionaires in the world.
About 90% (55m adults) of those have wealth of $1-$5m.
9% (4.5m adults) between $5m-$10m.
This leaves us with 3m adults having a net worth of over $10m.
Following the same pattern again only about 10% of those have net worth of over $50m.
Entering the size of a small city: now, there are only about 260.000 UHNW (>$50m) worldwide left.
85.000 adults have a >$100m net worth.
In the end we are left with a big global village of 7000 adults with a net worth of >$500m.
If you look at the wealth pyramid the 1% tip holds 50% of the world's wealth. The top 1% is a universe in itself:
A country (1% of world's population e.g. Germany) of millionaires within a metropolis of mult-millionaires (>$10m) within a suburb of UHNW (>$50m) within a village of billionaires. We tribal humans are simply not equipped to deal with such orders of magnitude in a meaningful empathic way.
When I'm reading this article and in particular that statement I'm left to wonder: Well, he also could mean the top 10% (-1%); this rounding error is simply the global middle class (2 bn adults) the other 50% wealth.
It doesn't take much to figure out that in our current wealth distribution machine, half of the world's adult population are a rounding error (1% of wealth), too.
Those wealth numbers can be roughly equated to access to resources; and when entering UHNW territory: +giant disproportionate influence in setting global policies. Probably like in a small city, they all know each other.
[0]https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us/en/reports-research/g...
In order to describe chemical reactions or atomic arrangements in terms of wave equations one normally treats the motion of the nuclei (slow/heavy) and the motion of the electrons (fast/light) separately simplifying the Schrödinger equation to the Born-Oppenheimer approximation.
In introductory chemistry textbooks [0] a diatomic example is mostly used as an illustration, for >2 atoms usually only the ground state is considered. This is because (1) in a diatomic setting the vibrational degree of freedom in the nucleus reduces to 1 and (2) the ground state can be well distinguished from other electronic states.
However when studying (advanced theoretical) chemistry or material sciences, polyatomic arrangement with tightly packed electronic states and a lot of nuclear degrees of freedom are the norm and the theory of so-called conical intersection of electronic energies essential in that regard.
Early on this was taken into account as the Jahn-Teller distortion[1]: a kind of spontaneous symmetry-breaking which seemed exotic when it was first described in the 1930s; in that same vein Teller later proposed an ultrarare occurrence within a few vibrational periods (sub-femtoseconds) by which a loss of electronic excitation was not followed by a photon being emitted: radiationless decay. Now, in refined orbital models [2] this seems to be a normal state of affairs e.g. in organic chemistry.[3]
Because of the tiny time scales involved theoretically predicted phenomena like a Geometrical phase/Berry phase (which itself has the Foucault pendulum in relation to Earth's latitude as its mechanical analogue [4]) have not been observed, yet. So borrowing from a topological analogue (Dirac points) [5] a quantum simulation seemed feasible.
To be honest the actual paper [6] linked in the article was hard to follow through so I found a similar paper [7] where the presentation of the general idea is more clear and concise.
[0]https://chem.libretexts.org/Courses/Pacific_Union_College/Qu...
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jahn%E2%80%93Teller_effect
[2]https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/9426023.pdf
[3]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quenching_(fluorescence)
[4]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_phase#Foucault_pen...
[5]https://condensedconcepts.blogspot.com/2015/08/conical-inter...
This seems to be the main point: a loss aversion regarding trust.
Ultimately, in order to really succeed at any big endeavor involving more than one person "trust" is essential. At some point the experience of "betrayal" (or "rejection" in another social context) will be inevitable and without the resources (social/financial support) to build up trust again, this negative experience will only be amplified.
"Betrayal" is one of the main drivers of virtually every story, in dramatizations the "cynic" naturally becomes the all-knowing, but without trust (or suspension of disbelief from the audience) there would be no story to tell, no adventure undertaken.
In a sense being cynical is robbing oneself of the richness of possibilities in order to contain the subset of betrayals in them. Those can be very costly and in impoverished circumstances quickly a fatal choice. But in another more harmless contexts one just wants to avoid feeling "dumb" by feeling smart enough to see through the little signs of intrigue and deception all around .... blissfully discarding the whole set and with it the probability of actually doing a smart thing.
While it is certainly interesting to entertain the idea of an author it can only be a rudimentary and fragmentary picture at best, given the discontinuity of the text itself, its sources and the time which had since passed.
What I find more fascinating than the search for a single authorship is how the written sources give us a peek into a lively oral tradition.[1]
What we understand today as "texts" must have been radically different back then, for the vast majority of people at the time there was no such thing as a final reference in the form of a written text, the presenter itself was the source. Infamously in the western tradition Socrates introduced by Plato is known for his refusal to write things down, the arguments given in Phaedrus against writing can be easily discarded today, but I think the effort put into the mastery of the spoken word in order to tell captivating 'stories' (or like in the case of Socrates engaging in arguments) must have been extraordinary to witness back then.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral-formulaic_composition
>[...] software engineering has accepted as its charter 'How to program if you cannot.'" [0] (1988)
The context is that CS has to tackle two "radical novelties" which aren't reflected accordingly in real world applications and education:
(1) Deep conceptual hierarchies:
>From a bit to a few hundred megabytes, from a microsecond to half an hour of computing confronts us with the completely baffling ration of 10^9! The programmer is in the unique position that his is the only discipline and profession in which such a gigantic ratio, which totally baffles our imagination, has to be bridged by a single technology. He has to be able to think in terms of conceptual hierarchies that are much deeper than a single mind ever needed to face before. Compared to that number of semantic levels, the average mathematical theory is almost flat. [EWD1036-7]
(2) Large-scale digital device:
>It is possible, and even tempting, to view a program as an abstract mechanism, as a device of some sort. To do so, however, is highly dangerous: the analogy is too shallow because a program is, as a mechanism, totally different from all the familiar analogue devices we grew up with. Like all digital encoded information, it has unavoidably the uncomfortable property that the smallest possible pertubations - i.e. changes of a single bit - can have the most drastic consequences. [For the sake of completeness I add that the picture is not essentially changed by the introduction of redundancy or error correction.] In the discrete world of computing, there is no meaningful metric in which "small" changes and "small" effects go hand in hand, and there never will be. [EWD1036-9]
[0]https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1036.PDF [EWD1036-10]
Holding the two concepts of an accelerated (!) (in terms of objects [1]) expanding universe and the fixed finite speed of light simultaneously in one's Euclidean head can be dizzying, so be prepare to draw and enjoy the hard earned manual labor of counterintuitive conclusions.
[0]https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0310808.pdf
[1]https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/universe-expansion-n...
So, for starters: 1000 new chemicals [0] are synthesized each hour (!) with little to no environmental oversight over them.
Our microbiome (protists, bacteria, archaea, fungi, viruses) seems to be a good proxy of how far we have strayed from the richness of our biochemical "informational flow" present 99.9...% of our time (evolutionary history).
In H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds (1898) the Martians are killed off by earthly pathogens or simply incompatibility. As noted in the article with H. pylori; "pathogens" are more often than not the result of an disturbed equilibrium, the modern world we indulge in is increasingly making us incompatible with earth's biochemical interface. By then trying to single out disease vectors the overall context gets completely lost. By emphasizing the biological role some perspective can be gained:
"Viruses" are powerful accelerators [1][2] for an otherwise slow mutation rate.
"Parasites" are relatively new connections which over time resolve themselves to a symbiotic relationships [3].
Even the much dreaded "parasitic worms" (helminths) have a great potential for immunotherapy [4].
In a sense this disconnect slowly began with agriculture/pastoralism in an effort to maximize the yield the environment turned hostile on us and so conceptually we introduced "pests" and declared war.
A successful model: we are now extracting resources on a globalized industrial scale. Our powerful tools have changed the landscape yet we are basically operating under the same scarcity mindset of an farmer 10.000 years ago: We earn our bread to support our family and make our sacrifices (pay taxes/tributes) to shield us from the wrath (anarchy/forces of nature) of the gods.
And indeed our human bandwidth to the biosphere becomes increasingly smaller while we hope - in that imagined scramble inherited from our ancestors - for an unlimited bandwith (e.g. to the spiritual world of eternal silicon) to free us from the tyranny and bondage of biological systems.
[0]https://www.seeker.com/chemical-pollution-is-soaring-faster-...
[1]https://whyy.org/segments/the-placenta-went-viral-and-protom...
[3]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hologenome_theory_of_evoluti...
[4]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helminthic_therapy#Hypothese...
>Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user's self-expression.
But I also have nothing against highly volatile treats from time to time reminding myself that in the end one must be also able to let go and enjoy the moment.
In keeping with the golden mean (μεσότης) these two things pushed too far are of course ugly, indeed, but the beauty of it very much depends from which side you need a steering direction.
For me for example the tension between the aesthetic choice (ornament) camouflaged by caricaturing multi-functionality (usefulness) of the packaging of an ordinary product is an artistic expression of the state of affair we find ourselves: instant technical obsolescence the moment you have the product in your hands becoming an artifact in its own right. Is art ever useful? Is its value ultimately not just based on a fundamental impotency? I guess nowadays the most talented pool of artists express themselves through marketing. /s