nkoren

Oh, I see, of course Wikipedia has the answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain%E2%80%93computer_interfa...

> Dobelle's first prototype was implanted into "Jerry", a man blinded in adulthood, in 1978. A single-array BCI containing 68 electrodes was implanted onto Jerry's visual cortex and succeeded in producing phosphenes, the sensation of seeing light. The system included cameras mounted on glasses to send signals to the implant. Initially, the implant allowed Jerry to see shades of grey in a limited field of vision at a low frame-rate. This also required him to be hooked up to a mainframe computer, but shrinking electronics and faster computers made his artificial eye more portable and now enable him to perform simple tasks unassisted.[46]

> In 2002, Jens Naumann, also blinded in adulthood, became the first in a series of 16 paying patients to receive Dobelle's second generation implant, marking one of the earliest commercial uses of BCIs. The second generation device used a more sophisticated implant enabling better mapping of phosphenes into coherent vision. Phosphenes are spread out across the visual field in what researchers call "the starry-night effect". Immediately after his implant, Jens was able to use his imperfectly restored vision to drive an automobile slowly around the parking area of the research institute.[citation needed] Unfortunately, Dobelle died in 2004[47] before his processes and developments were documented. Subsequently, when Mr. Naumann and the other patients in the program began having problems with their vision, there was no relief and they eventually lost their "sight" again. Naumann wrote about his experience with Dobelle's work in Search for Paradise: A Patient's Account of the Artificial Vision Experiment[48] and has returned to his farm in Southeast Ontario, Canada, to resume his normal activities.[49]

I recall watching a film about an 8x8 matrix of electrodes being inserted in the gap between the two hemispheres, just above the occipital lobe, producing 64 pixels worth of vision. The recipient had what looked like a DIN socket in the side of his head. I saw this film in a psychology 101 class at a community college, so it couldn't have been top-secret bleeding-edge research or anything. The year was 1991.

Every few years since then -- and seriously, it's happened at least 10 times now -- I've seen something similar announced as though it's a major breakthrough. I don't understand what's going on. Are each of these announcements -- and that 1991 film itself -- merely aspirational bullshit, which never really come off as planned? Or do they each represent distinct branches of research whose apparent similarity is merely a function of my layman's understanding?

You still have to spin up the planet. An earth-like atomosphere would freeze solid on the dark side, and air from the light side would be rushing into the dark side, where it would freeze, until the light side was stripped of its atmosphere too. So the atmosphere would just be a mobile ice cap on the far side, rotating around the planet once per year, with the only gaseous atmosphere being a small, constantly-moving region of sublimation at the terminator betwen the light and dark sides.

Make the atmosphere thick enough to not freeze on the far side, and it'll be absolutely boiling on the near side. The slow rotation means that there is no happy medium: either you've got an atmosphere freezing solid, or you're cooking half the planet at any given moment.

That stood out to me as well. There's a real opportunity cost to not moving more deliberately: those few extra months represent several hundred thousand lives lost. Could a vaccine be worse than that? Of course if the answer is yes, then that would be horrific -- you wouldn't want to vaccinate hundreds of millions of people and then discover that you've unintentionally shipped Thalidomide 2.0. But at the same time, the probability of such risks should be balanced against the certainties of what will happen without a vaccine.

Anybody who says that this is a simple or easy calculation frankly has no idea what they're talking about.

For people who weren't there, I think it's difficult to appreciate the kind of efficiencies which were gained by QNX and BeOS.

I first started running BeOS on my PowerPC Mac clone, back when those were a thing. There was a 1.44MB floppy disk circulating which contained pretty much the full OS, along with a web browser and various utilitied and demo applications.

Inside 1.44MB. It was phenomenal.

Compared to MacOS on the same machine, raw computational benchmarks were about 40% faster, and perceptually, the gains were even better than that, with essentially zero UI lag.

So, starting from scratch can have a lot of benefits, and you don't even need to throw out that much legacy.

It cuts both ways. You're not wrong, and yet atrocities frequently depend on people following orders, which is something that only an unreasonable person won't do.

Basically, for good or ill, history pivots around the unreasonable people. The reasonable ones might be bystanders or accomplices, but in either case, going with the flow is simply the reasonable thing to do.

"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."

-- George Bernard Shaw

Huh. 35+ years ago I enjoyed making animations like this, on my C-64 and a friend's Apple II, by writing very very long lists of POKEs and PEEKs. Funny to see thyis style coming back around again.

Do you honestly think that somebody trained in astronomy could mistake a bird for satellite? Have you seen how satellites move? They traverse the sky in a perfectly straight and constant-motion fashion that is utterly unlike any bird.

Even a high-altitude plane such as the U-2 would be fairly difficult to misidentify as a satellite. For obvious reasons, U-2s and SR-71s and such didn't employ lights while operating at altitude; therefore the only way to see them would be via reflected light. It would need to be reasonably long after sunset, or else the sky isn't dark enough to credibly see a satellite -- but not so long after sunset that the plane would be in the earth's shadow. Satellites have a similar window of observability -- but it's much longer, because they're much higher. A high-altitude plane would have a very small window. Moreover, it would need to execute that turn without crossing the terminator: as soon as any reflecting object crosses the terminator, that reveals its altitude.

A 3D artist I follow on Instagram has done similar things in CG, and I find them quite compelling. Admitedly the locations he sets them in are well-known to me, which probably amplifies the effect, but I think it's legitimately interesting work nonetheless.

https://www.instagram.com/sethithy/

This surely should give some credit to the venerable old Solar Cat Book:

https://www.amazon.com/Solar-Cat-Book-Jim-Augustyn/dp/089815...

(Which would evidently make me an alarming amount of money if I could find my old copy of it...)

This really is a much better source -- thank you!

I barely used ClarisWorks, but was very familiar with its BeOS-based successor, Gobe Productive. It was an incredible application; I used it as my primary office suite for years. It was just so well-integrated and thoughtfully designed; I have yet to see its equal.

Whether this kind of brilliant integration and thoughtfulness is something that could carry over to the kind of comprehensive feature sets of Microsoft Office or Libre Office is a valid question. My hunch is that it could. I wish somebody would try.

Good questions! I'm now living on a different continent, and haven't been able to follow Arcosanti's politics too closely, but my understanding is that the current leadership issues may in fact signal the end of the stagnation and decline, or at least a change in it.

To give a very brief overview of the secret history of Arcosanti: during the 1960s and 1970s, Paolo's radical philosophy took hold with the counter-cultural zeitgeist, leading to a huge influx of energy. At any given time, there might be several hundred people camping in the desert, volunteering for construction. A series of massive music festivals brought in a lot of new blood. But this energy was difficult to manage, and in truth, Soleri himself was not a counter-cultural character. In many respects he was a deeply conservative raised-by-nuns old-world Italian. Giant rock festivals just didn't suit his vibe, and the whole thing felt like it was spinning out of control. In 1978, one of the festivals created a multi-million-dollar liability when a field that had been used for overflow parking caught fire, and hundreds of cars burned.

This is all long before my time, but my understanding is that in the late 70s -- I think it was 1979 -- there was a kind of purge, afterwards remembered as the "Thanksgiving day massacre", wherein an inner circle of managers seized control and informed most of the volunteers that their services would no longer be needed. That made things more manageable, but it was the first of two major steps towards stagnation. The second was in 1983, when Paolo's wife Colly died. From what everyone has told me, she was the real power behind the throne; to the extent that there was any organizational competency at the top of the hierarchy, it came from Colly, not Paolo. When she died, all construction came to a halt, and the population declined to as low as 30 people. I believe 1990 was probably the low point.

Since then, Arcosanti has gone through successive waves of renewal and stagnation, roughly counter-cyclical to the outside economy. The population has oscillated between about 50 and 100 people. When I arrived in the summer of '92, a boom was starting. A recession at that time was pushing people to look for alternatives to capitalism and consumerism and such, and enough of those ended up at Arcosanti to bring it back to life. These people were quite intrinsically motivated; they weren't disciples of Soleri. But few people stayed long; the horizons were just too limited. Arcosanti has never evolved beyond being a company town; you're free to pursue your own initiatives in your spare time, but if you want to do your own thing full-time, you have to leave. So most people with a scrap of ambition, did. That's certainly why I did.

> 1) Can you expand on that? i.e., what would it take for Arcosanti to have succeeded? Just Paolo letting people run with it?

Kind of, yes. Although a more viable philosophy at the core of it would have helped. Paolo had some real insights into the nature of consciousness-emergence at urban scales being driven by complex interactions, and how the design of the physical environment could facilitate that. But he totally failed to realise that the economic environment also needed to be complex; he had no understanding of economics at all. Furthermore, he conceived of cities the way that architects conceive of buildings: as a object to be constructed. He needed to think in terms of processes rather than objects. A city's form is the emergent result of a system of rules, so if you want to change the form, you must change the rules -- not simply stipulate an alternative form, and ignore the rules entirely.

"Letting people run with it" might have sorted a lot of these issues out organically, but it could have been better conceived in the first place.

Ultimately, though, the problem was that Arcosanti was constrained to being a company town, unable to develop the necessary socio-economic complexity to become anything more. The resistance to being more than that came from two places: Paolo and his handful of upper managers. Paolo's reason, I believe, was that he had become comfortable being a sort of Jeremiah character: a prophet whom no one would listen too. He enjoyed saying "I told you so" as the world started to discover the appeal of things he'd been talking about decades earlier. But it's easy to have this attitude when your ideas haven't truly been tested. If Arcosanti had been allowed to develop to critical mass and beyond, then this would be a risk to the sort of ideological purity he enjoyed wallowing in, however lonely.

On the other hand, his core group of upper managers weren't at all ideological, but simply had comfortable lives which they didn't particularly want to see disrupted. Arcosanti growing to its full potential would have knocked them out of a lifestyle which they'd enjoyed since the early 1980s. So they were resistant to change.

As I understand it, however, there's been something of a coup, and those upper managers have just recently -- as of a few months ago -- been kicked out. I'm a bit sad about this, because personally I got along with them well, and Arcosanti's unlikely persistence over the decades is, in large part, due to them. On the flipside, however, Arcosanti's failure to develop into more than it is, is also due to them. It'll be interesting to see what happens now.

> 2) What, if anything, would it take to "revive" Arcosanti today? Money? Visionaries? Kicking people out?

The latter has evidently just happened. The first is definitely required. Not sure about the second; visionaries can be a three-edged blade.

If the current revolution there results in a community wherein people can pursue run their own businesses, live their own lives, and pursue their own agenda -- and if this is coupled to an economic model which facilitates the development of additional infrastructure, that is coherent with the overall masterplan -- then this is as much as I could hope for.

> 3) Why did you live there? Why did you leave? Any interesting stories?

I moved there when I was 16, because I was enamored with Arcology theory and wanted to learn everything I could about it. I left because it was time to go get an architecture degree and start my own career and life, which I knew would be too confined there.

As for interesting stories: yes, loads, but that's for another time. :-)

Guess I should offer: I lived at Arcosanti for 5 years, and knew Soleri well. AMA!

Water isn't a problem there. They've got wells tapping into the Agua Fria river, which is half a mile away. Its subsurface flow makes it the third largest river in the state.

Not his creepy traits per se, but certainly Paolo's ego impeded Arcosanti's development. Typical Founder's Syndrome: a general unwillingness to take on external ideas and relinquish control. When challenged, he would often tell people to get their own mesa and build their own arcology. This was always said with a smile and a laugh, but also, he meant it.

This was a huge problem. If there's any one thing which defines "what a city is", it's that it arises from a multiplicity of visions, not from a singular ideal. And Arcosanti needed multiple visions, because Soleri's vision was certainly incomplete. His understanding of economics, for example, was not just naive, but nonexistent.

Source: I lived at Arcosanti for 5 years in the mid 90s, and knew Paolo well.

Edit: but perhaps you're right, and there's some root psychological defect which manifests as both egotism and sexual abuse.

The Falcon Heavy uses 27 engines and has a perfect track record ,so they've got some credibility here.

Ah yes, those famous provinces of Russia, which but for the intervention of some meddling foreigners would have no language, culture, history, or national identity of their own.

Or, for more recent and perhaps relevant examples: Transnistria, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and the Donetsk Republic.

I'm defending a thesis I haven't thought about too much, but just to play devil's advocate, I'd say:

1.) Interesting about sedentary hunter-gatherers during the upper paleolithic -- I'd like to know more about that! But my argument would be that even if the the people were settled, the climate wasn't -- and that the severe climatic fluctuations which were happening would have been enough to deter the incremental steps towards agriculture.

2.) I presume Africa would have experienced the same climatic fluctuations as everywhere else. This begs the question of why they didn't develop agriculture 120k BPE, during the last interglacial? I'd argue it's because we still had some evolution to do to become behaviorally modern, around 80k BPE. So this interglacial is really our first time at-bat with a stable climate.

3.) True, but if they passed through the same bioregion/climate at the same time every year, then that's enough of a fixed point to begin experimenting with agriculture. My theory is as much about the mobility of the bioregions/climate as the people.

4.) Could be a counter-argument indeed. I know too little about New Guinea, which is a crazy fascinating place. I know that there was very early cultivation there, which was also abandoned some thousands of years ago. Don't know how that relates to its history of climate stability. Do say more?

Heh, that's a good reaction. :-)

Maybe I don't know the problem well enough, but the relatively simultaneous nature of domestication seems like less of a mystery to me. More recent domestications (eg. in the Americas) seem to indicate that a hunter-gatherer population needs to be getting comfortable with a particular bioregion for at least a thousand years or so before an accumulation of of local knowledge can lead to the development of decent local cultivars. If this is a general and defensible rule, then I think our climate history can provide the rest of the evidence.

The ice age wasn't just cold, it was also chaotic, with temperatures pinging all over the place from year to year:

https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/abrupt-cli...

In that context, any population would have had difficulty staying in one place for a thousand years -- I don't mean living a settled life, I just mean hanging out in generally the same bioregion. Bioregional adaptation would be detrimental in such an unstable environment: your tribe needs to stay mobile and highly adaptable, or it'll die. No chance to develop agriculture under those circumstances.

Eventually we enter a nice calm interglacial period, and settle down to do some fishing -- then spend the next thousand years being chased around by rapidly rising sea levels and mega-floods from bursting glacial dams.

Finally, about 11k-10k BPE, all that settles down -- although not without us acquiring some nice flood myths along the way -- and we have time settle down and start getting to know some bioregions on a long-term basis. A thousand years or so later, we've got agriculture popping up all over the place.

Seems like a reasonable story? Or am I missing something?

> but the state of public knowledge is so remedial that it's genuinely frustrating sometimes.

This, I believe! Although it's probably a true statement for virtually any scientific profession.

That said: I don't know the first thing about Graham Hancock, and I'm quite comfortable dismissing Velikovsky and his ilk as cranks. Just because one can construct an absurd theory to explain things one doesn't understand, doesn't mean one should.

And yet... I was reading about the Norte Chico civilisation the other day, and thinking that it was really quite weird that they started building ziggurats at pretty close to the same time as the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Chinese also started building ziggurats.

Really, the global flourishing of that exact form at that exact time -- in sites separated by thousands of miles, with no possibility of communication between them -- is honestly quite weird, right?

When I've mentioned these kind of thoughts to archaeologically-trained friends, I've often encountered a curious lack of curiosity -- "yes, obviously just a crazy coincidence, can't be anything besides that, let's talk about something else now" -- or asserting theories, as facts, about how ziggurats are just an inevitable step in the development of urban architecture (this is definitely untrue).

Both of these reactions are troubling to me. Dismissing these sort of things as "not a mystery" is doing them a disservice. Imagine how many great discoveries would have passed us by if every piece of initially-baffling evidence were dismissed as "just a coincidence". And while it's clearly irresponsible to to go on yammering about aliens or Atlantis or whatever -- at least in the absence of much more extraordinary evidence -- I don't think that it's much more responsible to concoct theories which are prosaic but obviously false.

Anyhow, minor rant there, sorry. I have absolutely no working theory as to why ziggurats started popping up all over the place 5,000 years ago. I just want to hear a non-crackpot archaeologist admit that yes, that's a legitimate mystery, and that if it's just a coincidence, it's a very weird one.

I'm going to do something deeply shameful, and link to a Daily Mail article on the subject. It's weirdly... pretty good. It has some of the better photographs that I've seen of the site, and an angle on the story which is perhaps somewhat fantastical, but is evocative enough to be worth pondering:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1157784/Do-m...

I'm assuming that they are pre-Filter, but not the first. From the moment they develop radio technology, they immediately start receiving signals from dozens of existing alien civilisations. This causes them to think "shit, we really have to do something about this."

Some of those civilisations may already be far more advanced, and have taken to the stars tens of thousands of years previously. No matter. The interstellar mass driver is a weapon against which no defense can be erected. No level of technology can track a 1-meter-wide iron sphere as it moves through interstellar space at near-lightspeed. If you're on the receiving end of a volley, the insanely blueshifted, tiny spec of light from the projectile won't arrive until shortly before the projectile itself. To an observer, it would appear as if all the planets in the system suddenly started exploding. Few systems would even be able to get a warning cry out, and those who did would be unable to provide actionable intelligence on where the attack came from. Even if they could provide actionable intelligence, their warning would spread out at light-speed. If there were listeners to receive it, then those listeners would also presumably have attracted the attention of the Fearers -- and a fusillade of projectiles would already be inbound towards them, almost immediately behind the warning itself.

Imagining such a scenario, the Fearers say to themselves: "If we don't do something like this, then surely it's only a matter of time before somebody else does. And we'll have no way to see it coming. So the first species to build interstellar mass drivers will, inevitably, be the last species left standing. Therefore, we have no choice but build and use them ourselves."

In other words, they do unto others not because they're bugnuts paranoid, but because they have a not-altogether-unrealistic apprehension that if they don't, others will do unto them.

This isn't Mutual Assured Destruction as we know it. What made MAD work was the fact that enemies could observe each other in realtime, and that retaliatory strikes would be possible. Neither is the case here. The Fearers are convinced that the only rational course of action is to assume others will attack someday -- if they haven't already -- and therefore their attack needs to be launched immediately.

There's nothing which says that the Great Filter needs to be caused by endogenous factors. Let's say that these are all relatively "easy" to achieve: planets, life, complex life, technological civilisation. Even if they're "easy" now, there will have been a time, billions of years ago, when they weren't. Let's say that all of this has only been achievable since the emergence of the first high-metallicity stars, maybe 5 or 6 billion years ago.

At that time, There will have been a number of "first" civilisations. Imagine that one of those civilisations grew up to be even more paranoid than us. "Nature, red in tooth and claw" shaped their psychology profoundly. For them, to meet any strange species is to utterly fear it. They know, to the core of their being, that if they do not annihilate the stranger, the stranger will annihilate them. Let's call this species "the Fearers".

So when The Fearers become aware of the potential for species elsewhere in the galaxy to exist, they decide that the best defence is a good offence. They throw all of their civilisational resources into developing technology which ensures that no alien species will ever bother them.

Assembler probes are dispatched to a large metal asteroid. They pull it apart, re-assembling it into an autonomous listening post attached to a 10-million-kilometer-long solar-powered mass driver. If the listening post detects signals from any species other than the Fearers, then the mass driver will spend a few years tweaking its orbit, take careful aim, and dispatch a stream of projectiles towards the source of the signal. Each projectile only weighs a few hundred kg, but travels at 99.9% the speed of light, making it a gigaton-class impactor. Not quite a planet-killer, but the mass driver can take several shots per hour, and has trillions of tons worth of ammunition at its disposal. It spends a few years shelling the source of the signals, plus any other planetary body in the target system, just in case the emerging technological civilisation was able to develop interplanetary capabilities before the first impactor arrived.

The Fearers realise that although this first mass driver is sufficient to clear their local neighbourhood of potential adversaries, they are still, in the long term, vulnerable. What if some species on the far side of the galaxy was able to develop interstellar travel, making them potential resilient to such an attack? The Fearers then conceive of a next-generation defense grid: self-reproducing probes which spread out through the galaxy, establishing listening posts and mass drivers every 100 light-years or so. It only takes a few hundred thousand years to saturate the galaxy with the these defence stations. There, they lurk indefinitely, completely radio-silent, waiting to snuff out signals as soon as they arrive.

Unfortunately for the Fearers, their early foray into self-replication causes them to succumb to a Grey Goo catastrophe, shortly after launching the first interstellar defence probes. But the damage was done. The Fearers have now been gone for billions of years, but their defence grid remains active. In that time, hundreds of thousands of technological civilisations have emerged, but within a century of their first long-range radio broadcasts, all of them have been snuffed out by a fusillade of near-lightspeed projectiles. That is too short of a window for any species to develop the class of interstellar capabilities needed to survive such an event.

Maybe this story seems implausible. But these kind of capabilities will probably be within humanity's grasp within a couple hundred years -- and the galaxy has been around for billions of years, during which it only takes a single species being that much of an asshole to construct a Great Filter like this.

It's scenarios like this which really make me hope that the Great Filter is behind us.

You don't even need to go to Southern Mexico for that. There's a small enclave town in Phoenix, Arizona, called Guadalupe. It's a Mexican / native community. In the centre of town, there's a public square flanked by two Catholic churches.[1] One is a very traditional Catholic church. The other is a syncretic church which (according to people I knew in the community) mixed in many elements of Yaqui spirituality.

The survival of native spirituality, even within syncretic religion, is always somehow reassuring to me, given how much cultural vandalism occurred during the colonisation of the Americas.

1: https://www.google.com/maps/@33.3690036,-111.9644457,3a,15.4...

Hey, I'm neither a Catholic nor a monotheist. I've got no personal dog in this fight, except that as a rule, my sympathies are generally aligned with indigenous peoples. And yeah, people can be super hypocritical: mote in your eye vs. the beam in my own, et cetera. And yeah, I agree that the genocidal excess commited by the conquistadores was, taken as a whole, the worst thing happening in the Americas at the time.

But Diego de Landa wasn't taking it in as a whole. He was just having his personal experience. There's little reason to doubt the child sacrifice incident: that kind of thing absolutely did occur, and is well-attested both textually and archeologically. He didn't have the 10,000' view of the American genocide: he had a personal view, and he acted accordingly.

Usually I'm not this sympathetic. When I read first-hand accounts of Pizzaro's conquest of the Inca at Cajamarca, for example, I'm appalled. Pizzaro's guys take umbrage at the Incan' Emporer disrespecting a bible by throwing it, incomprehending, on the ground. In retribution for this, they delight -- positively delight -- in immediately slaughtering several thousand unarmed members of the emperor's court. It's absolutely sick and indefensible, driven by a religious zealotry that (IMHO) had stripped them of their basic humanity.

I'd always assumed that Diego de Landa was a similar kind of zealot, but when I read more, I found that it wasn't so simple. That's all I'm saying. Even when things are black and white at a high level, there can be greys in the details.

The destruction of those codixes is, without a doubt, one of the greatest acts of cultural vandalism in history. Absolutely tragic.

At the same time, I've read a bit more about that incident, and... this is probably not politically correct to say, but I did develop some sympathy for that bishop. Yes, he was a religious zealot who couldn't distinguish other cultures from "satanism". But also, well, the Maya were in a pretty rough state when he encountered them. They'd been experiencing severe drought and civil war and plagues brought by the Europeans and more. Their way of dealing with this was mass human sacrifice. The Maya didn't have a sacrificial-industrial complex the way that the Aztecs did, but when nothing else would appease the gods, that's what they'd do.

So anyhow, the Bishop had apparently witnessed a mass human sacrifice. Of children. And it really got to him, convincing him that their religion was strictly satanic. Given his own cultural frame, and what he witnessed, it's hard for me to say that I would have done any differently under the circumstances. That would've gotten under my skin too. Hard to say I would've kept perspective after that.

Oh, of course the roof is amazing, one of the crowning achievements of human ingenuity, IMHO. But for some reason the floor impresses me at least as much.

If you're a Roman working on that roof, you know you're doing something totally unprecedented in human history. So you pull out all the stops with an utterly heroic feat of engineering and construction. That's very impressive, but when it comes to the floor -- well, plenty of buildings have floors, nothing groundbreaking about that. So, y'know, just call the flooring contractors and have them install something nice.

The fact that something relatively ordinary is still performing so well, a couple thousand years later, is what blows my mind. Today, I'm sure that a gathering of the world's greatest engineers would be capable of designing a dome that would last for millennia. But I doubt there's any flooring contractor on earth who would give even a hundred-year guarantee on their work.