doingtheiroming

A regional conflict like India / Pakistan is far more likely than a superpower apocalypse and nuclear power would be hugely helpful in that situation. The same goes for a major volcanic eruption or any number of other disasters we might face which affect the amount of solar energy available.

One more reason that we need nuclear power. It keeps going when the sun doesn’t shine for whatever reason. If the Netherlands’ greenhouses switched to electric heating, they can produce food year round. Indoor farming is an unsung hero of modern agriculture that we can use much more of when we get the cost of energy down. And it’s also a way for us to survive all sorts of catastrophes, not only a nuclear war.

Horrifying. So much human ingenuity and energy burned in a process seemingly designed to prevent the thing it is supposed to encourage.

Nuclear weapons are reasonably well controlled. I’d love to know that they were better controlled than they are though. The same applies to virus research.

The borek spanakopita wars are eternal. And don’t get the Bulgarians started on Banitza.

Is it not a feature given how many security issues come out of parsing? There is virtue in the thing you’ll edit files with as root being as simple as you can make it.

I’ve bought a few over the years, particularly when Borders had its great magazine sections. They were uniformly turgid and boring and I was consistently disappointed. They are their own worst enemy.

When has the housing market ever been normal? It’s had periods of equilibrium. Is that a synonym for normality? If we are thinking it terms of common features over time, perhaps the housing market mostly appearing to be demented is actually normality.

Surprisingly high number of happily married stoners in here.

It’s a trope in British politics that the real division is not between left and right but between roundhead and cavalier. It’s a useful way to think about things. The British tend to prefer a bit of the cavalier in their Prime Ministers. The cavaliers do well until they forget that the British also expect at least a roundheadish front when the times call for it.

Like Charles I though, Johnson believes in the divine right of toffs and seems likely to end up with his Government decapitated.

I've been reading, "The Man on the Donkey" over the last few months or so (so much for the 50 books...). It's a historical novel set in C16 England written in the 1950s. It's an immersive experience using language and descriptions of custom and habit to create a strong sense of the time. Many of the aspects of life mentioned in the article (mattresses of straw, shared beds and rush lights) are there but interestingly, not once have I read a mention of the two sleeps.

The author is a historian but either wasn't aware of the practice or didn't feel it worth including. The richness with which she describes other aspects of C16 life is so great though that I find it hard to believe she would not have known if it were a well understood practice. Perhaps sleep is an example of a custom that it is hard to think about doing differently from the way we do and was just missed. But it seems strange that such a big aspect of life isn’t widely understood by historians.

Reading Rose and Leowentin's "Not in our Genes" was formative for me. I read it when I was 17 or 18 and very political. Even then, though the book was clearly anti-sociobiology (as it defined it) it had nuance and drew a distinction between genetics and biology that left little doubt that the slate was not entirely blank - but that looking for individual genes to explain complex human behaviour was unlikely to be fruitful.

Although when I read it I came away thinking "the sociobiologists are baddies", the discussion of reductionist thinking and distinctions between genetics and biology that ran through the book, ended up priming me to be much more open minded about the subject that perhaps the authors intended. It also gave me a skepticism of psychology that turned out to be well founded as the replication crisis hit. It really set me up to be excited by systems and complexity. It certainly led to me taking classes in the philosophy of science at University and probably caused exhaustion on the part of my sociology teacher as I spent my time poking holes in methodology discussions.

I might re-read the book and Wilson's Sociobiology side by side. I remember it being very readable and less doctrinaire than a book whose introduction calls out the authors' Marxism could be expected to be. And there's clearly a lot more to Wilson than the book made out.

The odd thing about opposition to lab-leak hypotheses is precisely that it defines itself by that opposition. If the wet markets were the source surely vigorous campaigning against wet markets would be of more utility that vigorously scouring the internet for alternative ideas to downvote.

Given we know that lab leaks happen continually we should all perhaps be campaigning vigorously for an end to wet markets, protection for cave habitats, better controls in labs in general and a complete moratorium with gain of function research.

We don’t know where this pandemic came from but we know enough to say that it’s likely all those things could be sources in the future. So perhaps leave the debate alone and focus on stopping the next pandemic.

It’s only a conspiracy theory when people I don’t like say it.

The fact that the current version was published 2017 (so 2016 info) and IPv6 is still a moving target? I suspect that isn’t the reason to post it but it’s relevant.

Isn’t the problem you’re raising here simply that the studies tend to look at populations rather than individuals or even sub-groups? It’s a neat way to demonstrate the problem. The challenge is that as long as we treat the RCT as the primary means by which we build knowledge, it will remain difficult to study sub-groups because it’s so hard to obtain a sufficient sample.

$600T costs of climate change by 2100. Assuming current global GDP of $90T (which itself makes the claim that global wealth amount to $300T today questionable), and average global growth across that time of 2%, global GDP will be something like $450T annually. Sounds manageable.