jnicholasp

This sounds like sarcasm, but yes: solar collectors in close orbit around the sun, huge flying parabolic mirrors focusing solar energy that's already 7-10x more dense than it is at 1 AU, beaming that energy to receivers sitting in orbit around the Earth (perhaps at Lagrange 1 and, via L4/L5, L2 to reach the night side of the planet), relayed in to near earth orbit satellites, and being beamed down to many surface locations at safe intensities that might well be used to boil ocean water, driving steam turbines and producing fresh water (and salt).

Such a system could provide energy dense power to the entire solar system (skipping the steam turbine step for most locations, and going pure solar electric), up to large installations for entire planets, and down to individual spaceships.

I'm not suggesting we'll do it tomorrow. But within a hundred years, if we get and keep our shit together..?

Brilliant, thanks. So how long before we start putting solar panels in close, direct orbit around the Sun?

Transmission is one thing, but collection is another: did they really only collect 6 megabytes of data over the course of a 6 hour flyby?

Off topic, ish: does anyone know how large a solar panel array would have to be to supply all of our current energy use, if the array orbited the Sun at the same distance Mercury does?

Which is, by kind of a long ways which makes your valid point sort of amusingly understated, the least of the legal injustices that black people in America have been subject to.

Does it complicate your scenario if the private information the whistleblower has illegally accessed was itself illegally accessed, as is the case in the Snowden situation? Doesn't it make the government's position ironically untenable, to want to prosecute someone for doing on a relatively small scale what they've been doing on a massive scale?

If we take his stated motivations at face value, he's genuinely concerned that we hedge our bets against existential threats as soon as possible. Establishing a colony on another planet is both within planning range and likely the strongest hedge we can currently make. If he thinks he can get there, I'll take his published timelines with grains of salt, but at this point I'll also trust him that the goal is plausible.

I'd be happy to hear about the important things that the humanities have produced recently. In your comment above, the only claims about their current value that I see is the statement that they continue to be a moderating influence on the world, and that they teach us how narratives shape our ideas.

I'm dubious that their moderating influence is significantly more than the residual influence of old moral ideas, albeit with newly enforced reach (i.e., hey guys, "do unto others" should maybe also apply to women/black people/gays). You couldn't get a patent for that kind of obvious development of an old idea. And the notion that narratives shape perceptions doesn't strike me as a particularly profound insight, although I suppose it could be argued that's a post hoc bias.

Secular humanism and democracy are more than two hundred years old. What have the humanities given to the world since then that compares to those, or that compares to the changes to the world that science has made in that period?

If you care about these kinds of questions, that's what I mean by "my tribe", regardless of the answers we each give. I'm not invested in my perception that the humanities are under-performing their potential, but I don't currently see a strong argument on the other side. Maybe I'm failing to consider something.

I made my comment because I wholly agree with you about the importance and the past contributions of the humanities, and because I'm so disappointed in how deeply they've lost their way.

The biggest problems in the world today are humanities problems (although tech and science may be able to indirectly end-run around them if we survive long enough), and the humanities are completely failing to make any useful progress. I'm bitter about it, because there are so many smart people wasting themselves in trivial cleverness-competitions rather than solving meaningful problems, and because they're my tribe and they're betraying their potential. (And, bias disclosure: at least partly because I can't find anyone to date who's interested in the things I'm interested in, whose work I don't think is ultimately useless and unimportant.)

Turning an article into a clean PDF is a sufficient value addition to deserve an extra six months of exclusive license?

As a humanities type who nevertheless despises the academic uselessness of the realm, let me suggest that the extra six months is given to humanities papers because nothing that happens in them matters, and any value that anyone can contrive to get from them, they deserve to keep.

But maybe that's a little too harsh. Is anything valuable coming out of the humanities these days?

> Drug users aren't victims of the war on drugs

Tell that to the world's largest prison population, half of whom are there on drug-related charges. A very small percentage of drug users are hopeless addicts who would consume public health resources in a de-criminalized, health-focused system, but all drug users are criminals under the War on Drugs and potential 'consumers' of the costs of law enforcement investigation, legal prosecution, and ongoing expensive incarceration.

> Drug users are victims of their own poor choices.

The majority of drug users aren't victims of anything - they're perfectly functional, productive, creative members of society, who you don't know exist all around you because they're completely normal in exactly the same way that the majority of people who drink alcohol are completely normal, functional, productive members of society.

> What the politicians hallucinate on, that's a good question.

The same thing, plus more: money, power, status, the ego boost of being Senator/Governor/President.

If you wanted to be cute, but also maybe open up a new path for your intuitive response to take, you could simply switch the referent for 'addicted users' in your sentence so that it doesn't mean 'the end users of drugs', but instead now mean 'the DEA and all other government and law enforcement agents whose jobs and budgets are dependent on the War on Drugs'. Your next sentence would then be exactly as valid: "they've made so many stupid decisions, disregarded so many warnings, broken laws, possibly [definitely] harmed other people (theft, robbery, etc.), and now people like me [...] have to pay for them".

I understand your intuitive response - it feels injust for prudent, productive people to have the fruit of their good choices taken from them in order to pay for the imprudence of other people. But you are already having to pay for the stupid choices of other people re: drugs, but you are paying much more - both in money and in the societal costs of corruption, erosion of trust in law enforcement, and the world's largest prison population - to support the corrupt and misguided War on Drugs than you would pay simply to support the relatively small number of hopeless addicts that would exist in a sane, health-focused system. It feels like switching to a sane, health-focused system would be a new cost to you, but it would actually be a price reduction over what we are already paying for, and for a far better outcome.

Yeah, I figured, no worries. Your English is excellent, apart from this little oddity. Either way to put the 's' is fine, really, but I think with the apostrophe (50's) is more common.

50ties - Fifty-ties -- Fifties - 50s / 50's

If somebody pours the foundation, somebody else frames the walls, a bunch of other people hang the drywall and run the wires and hook up the plumbing, and then I come along and lay the carpet, I'm obviously an idiot if I try to take credit for the entire house. But I certainly deserve to be paid for laying the carpet. How much work was done on the house before I got there has nothing to do with whether or not I, in my turn, spent my time and knowledge and effort to make something that was valuable too.

Incidentally, did you really mean to say that you spent your life around the smartest person in the world? If so, well, I'm skeptical but also curious who you think the smartest person in the world is.

You gilded the tip of [i.e., added a valuable new link to] a long chain [of valuable independent links each created by some individual or small group of individuals] of human creation that the world was lucky enough to be handed, and now the world thinks you fucking owed it that? That's absurdly arrogant.

If you create a thing in the world that did not exist before, and other people find it valuable, why should you not be able to reap some of that value? Why is the world more entitled to the thing you made, the insight you had, and the work you put in, than you are?

"When you have everything you have nothing."

I don't see any real meaning in this statement. The "nothing" of having all your material needs and wants met at your whim, is better than having to struggle all day every day just to survive - except for people whose entire value system is built around the virtue of hard work and struggle, or for people who think it's valuable and important that humans rely on other humans, and therefore like arrangements in which individuals will fail on their own and are forced to cooperate with others in order to survive.

Those value systems are not inherently right, and not everyone holds them. Why is there anything to "get over" about the not-necessarily-social aspects of individual freedom and opportunity?

I'm not sure where you got that connotative sense for "dwelling". It shouldn't carry negative value - it's a very neutral term for a place someone lives.

"To dwell on" something isn't inherently negative either, it simply means to spend a fair amount of time thinking or focusing on a single thing. Whether that's good or bad depends on the context, and is not implied by the word itself.

Peer review as currently done certainly isn't foundational to the scientific method, but the general principle of having ideas checked and examined by as many other minds as are capable of understanding them, does lead to stronger and more reliable ideas over time. Not everything that science deals with is quantifiable or directly testable; results must be interpreted, and theories have to be made about the wider reasons for those results in order to come up with the next set of experiments; this is the realm of discussion and argument, rather than measurement or direct tests, and science is best advanced when there is strong, productive discussion among competent arguers.

By far the most interesting, engaging, wide ranging, and thought provoking review of a dictionary I've ever read.

The strength of this recommendation seems like it should be diminished by the fact that I've only ever read one review of a dictionary, but I defy anyone to produce a better one. If you can, though, I definitely want to read your candidate.

I'd be interested in that link if you can recall it.

I would guess, though, that the website was counting different forms of the 'same' word as distinct words - e.g., jump, jumped, jumping is three words rather than one word with several tenses. Obviously counting this way will multiply the same person's vocabulary several times vs the alternate way.

1-3 hours? Do you have a source for that advice? Everything I've read, and my personal experience with it, suggests taking it (as you say, .5 to 1mg) 30 minutes before you want to fall asleep.

This is possible in some circumstances with real estate - it's called a 1031 exchange, and you can sell one piece/set of real property, roll the profits directly into purchasing another piece/set of real property, and not owe capital gains taxes on the profits from the first sale, although they will be owed if you eventually sell the second set of properties for cash.

Nobody does. It's ripe for submission to a literary theory journal.

There are thousands of problems in the world, and you, like all of us, are almost certainly doing absolutely nothing about the vast majority of them, even if you've picked a few that you do care about and are actively engaged in. Does it make sense for someone who has picked a different set of things than you to care about, to denounce you as an ignorant douchebag because you aren't fighting their fight?

If not, does it really make sense for you to call others, at the drop of a hat, ignorant douchebags for not fighting the battle that you've chosen to fight?

I agree with most of your historical analysis, and I agree with your final sentence (People want safety; they want security; they want conformity; they want power over others.), but I think, of the four things in that sentence, only the first two are fundamental, and the last two are mostly desired as a means to the first two. I.e., people want safety and security, and see the power to ensure others' conformity to their vision of how the world should be as a means to be safe and secure in the way they want to live.

I think if we can create enough freedom and opportunity for people to live as they want to live, in as much or as little community with like minded others as they want, where they don't feel that their particular way of life is threatened, then we will see much, much fewer attempts to control other people.

This is the basic standard of social coexistence: my right to control my world ends at the equilibrium point between my legitimate interest and yours. John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is really great on this topic.

Never having sex again would definitely suck.

Never having sex again because you're dead sucks more.

Comparing the relative severity of problems, and saying that one is worse than the other, in no way implies that therefore the other problem isn't also a problem.

At some point we will need to take an active part in regulating the planet's weather and various climates. Orbiting solar panels on orbits that pass between us and the sun, that can be selectively turned edge on, or perpendicular, to the sun, would let us control solar influx to particular surface regions, limiting energy input in specific places while also harvesting that energy and enabling us to put it to use as needed without increasing total energy/heat input.

Cf. G.K. Chesterton: "The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right."

Ok, I more or less agree with you here. A car is not a fundamental object, it's composed of many layers of constituent objects which eventually resolve down to fundamental particles and forces. And if physicalism is true, then consciousness also is not fundamental, but ultimately resolves down to fundamental particles and forces also.

I don't know whether physicalism is true. It certainly seems like the best overall account of the universe that we currently have, but if there is a chink in physicalism's armor, consciousness might be it. Might. But, you're right, there's a huge leap between "might" and "is".