tritium

The address in this article (53 New York Avenue NE) appears to be slightly incorrect.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/49+O+St+NE,+Washington,+DC...

That's exactly what I mean about proposing a notion that serves as a challenge to a point of view. I was pretty confident I was putting forward a statement that someone would take issue with, even if it's part of a sentiment I buy into.

Anyway, the original atoms and molecules of that first cell are long gone, yet here we are. In terms of qualifying one's semblance of self, I think infant amnesia also represents a significant developmental boundary, for "counting" as a self aware human. If you don't remember learning to walk, was it "you" that learned? It's a pretty fluid and blurry line for human existence.

  A car is not a car without the human, with the keys to the car, sitting in the driver's seat, in a state ready and capable to operate the vehicle, and in possession of valid paperwork in good-standing, proving that they are legally entitled to operate the vehicle.
  A car is not a car without the human, with the keys to the car, sitting in the driver's seat, in a state ready and capable to operate the vehicle.
  A car is not a car without the human, with the keys to the car, sitting in the driver's seat.
  A car is not a car without a human sitting in the driver's seat.
  A car is not a car without a human to drive it.
  A car is not a car without a human inside it.
  A car is not a car without an animal inside it.
  A car is not a car without an object inside it.
  A car is not a car without an engine inside it.
  A car is not a car without something inside it.
  A car is not a car without anything inside it.

Doesn't hold up. The car remains a car, so long as it is actually a car.

If you really want to challenge views about being a human, consider that each of us all have been single celled animals for at least a couple of seconds, if not minutes or hours, of our lives. It didn't stay that way, but it's an incontrovertible fact for every last one of us, and indeed also for lots of other organisms.

Plenty of passengers ride the bus, but the bus is not redefined by this.

Is presence of species and biological diversity more relevant than transient geological evidence, asteroid impacts and tectonic activity? Without geological evidence (fossils) we would have no benchmark for non-living species.

Arguably, all geological timescales and frames of reference (as named by humans, and thus innately political) are based, not on biological taxonomy and known degrees of species diversity, but rather, on geological records, for which radioactive markers from weapons testing carried out by humans, remains a relevant and valid point of reference that may outlast us.

Well, consider that one way or another, we've written ourselves into the geological record, as much as we've written our own history about ourselves. History, often airbrushed, is a sociological exercise, and so, it's always been a soft science.

Geological and cosmological history is filled with hypothesized events and broad revisions in the face of emergent (if subtle) proof against common views and norms. Lots of hypothetical place holders aren't apolitical at all. The big bang is pretty political, despite the background radiation that serves as "reasonable evidence" that something like the big bang might have occurred. The truth being that we don't honestly know why a universe would be created through a big-bang-like process, even though it's the best interpretation of the evidence we have access to, lately.

Large error margins are artifacts of incomplete information, and that doesn't mean incomplete information is truly preferable. We have pretty good information about 20th century events, even if the particulars of the social landscape are hotly debated.

Two wrongs don't make a right. Just because one party is doing it, doesn't mean we want everyone doing it, or even that we wanted it to ever happen at all.

The way I see it, without getting into the prevailing connotations of "hacking" versus "cracking," quantum computing only strengthens wire security (data in motion), by preventing interception, since observation results in tamper evidence. Meaning that the new level of "quantum" security relies heavily on dedicated isolation between the transmitter and the receiver. This part only reveals that a copy of the enciphered message may have been captured by someone eavesdropping on the signal.

It doesn't mean an enemy couldn't simply deny service by knocking out the satellite, or try to capture information via a side channel by sneaking into a peripheral system's firmware, but it means when bouncing a "beam" off a satellite, the signal might enjoy totally private transmission, end-to-end, or show that someone noticed the message, and may try to decode it, indicating compromised information and a possible loss of surprise or hazard of enemy awareness.

As for unbreakable codes (data at rest), I'm pretty sure most military protocols lean heavily on one-time pads. I'd very honestly guess that prime number ciphers and the like are, well, probably secretly flimsy, and intended for civilian consumers to chase their tails over, while celebrity security bros widely endorse them as a means of cashing in on smart phone apps or book deals.

A lot of the quantum secrecy technology is buzz-wordified as "teleportation entanglement space foam time travel" or whatever, by journalists, but here's an old article I was able to quickly Google:

https://qz.com/760804/chinas-new-quantum-satellite-will-try-...

Don't worry, I'm with you on this one. It's a garbage format, and it's assuredly a willful lack of organization as an exclusionary tactic, used to alienate people on some level, and require degrees of subordination among those late to the party. Is it simply a natural defense mechanism, that preserves an otherwise autonomous complex system? Maybe...

It's used all over the internet, and it's, by turns, a passive aggressive posture. Some acquiesce, and others enforce. The rest abandon. Linux follows a similar pattern with RTFM.

The Linux community process, as an example, has graduated to exclusion through sheer volume, with shrugs all around, as if to say the world really is just that complicated. But it's not. Inertia makes the situation more complicated than things need to be, and that disorganization (which was originally a product of the "everything is a file/lots of tiny, specialized executable programs" philosophy started with UNIX, leaves everyone blameless and) offers advantages to what I've come to refer to as trivia sherpas, who understand the seniority they've accumulated, and wish to keep things that way.

It often doesn't start as anything malicious, and some of it really is incidental, but that it stays that way is no accident. Sort of like the petroleum and automobile industry dynamic. Neither was an ideal solution for the problems they solve, but once circumstances snowballed in a certain direction, we all got stuck with these elephants in the room. Is it possible to uproot and improve the situation? I wonder...

Yeah, I have to scratch my head about the whole anonymous lack of a unique number. Were IP addresses not part of early packet switched networks like ARPA net?

Still, worse than IP addresses are IMEI numbers, on your person frequently, as you move from place to place, trackable in crowds, and from aircraft overhead.

While we’re kidding around, once I have your gun, all I need to do is trade a $1 bullet to get my ring back!

Given the fanaticism of the gun debate, if laws don’t prohibit the medium of exchange, you can bet that anything from scrap copper plumbing and wire, to lumber, to livestock would be accepted in some circles, in order to breathe life into a market with enough demand.

True! And now I’m realizing, depending on position in the network, the server doen’t even need to exist, if one only needed to MITM the request traffic... Geeze.

True, but email is pretty crufty with headers and markup, and that compounds with the flotsam of unread spam retained out of laziness, and for the sake of completion. Not to mention that duplication occurs with the endlessly indented prior messages retained in lengthy reply chains across all conversation participants. Compression of that kind of information helps, but compression only attacks the problem only in the usual blind, robotic manner.

I’d estimate that high definition video has similar problems, in that 24 hours of a pitch black screen with an ambient noise floor, captured at 4K screen resolution, and 240 frame rate, would still eat up 1TB, even with an efficient codec, because imperceptible thermal noise in the frames leaves a lot of uncompressible variation in the pixel raster, even though the actual color differences are imperceptible to people.

To be really dangerous, I think this would need to defeat client-side cache strategies. If the browser caches each resource, the server-side reads wouldn't account for repeated characters or overall length with perfect accuracy. Consider palindromes like "racecar."

This would still put many, if not most, passwords within guessable striking distance, for anyone able to intercept plain-text HTTP traffic, between Alice (the client) and Bob (the CSS image resource server).

If you don't think bartering doesn't work, I have a shiny diamond ring for you, if you're willing to change your mind.

And, oh yeah, by the way, even if we do “solve” this “problem” by mining asteroids, and unlock an unlimited supply of all minerals on demand at all times, how long before we import so much mass, that we drastically alter the concentrations of strange, toxic compounds in the biosphere, well beyond what would have ever been possible with decades of the most dehumanizing mining operations imaginable?

In a hypothetical worst-case scenario, let’s imagine the world had an insatiable appetite for mercury thermometers, and presto! Asteroid mining to the rescue! We discover that all the asteroids have a delicious, juicy mercury core!

Extrapolated to extremes, the world adopts disposable mercury thermometers as the new normal, and in a decade, methylmercury poisons the globe, as landfills accumulate tons and tons of broken thermometers, and the waste quickly seeps into the water table.

Inexhaustable supply can cause problems on its own.

If you had to choose between food and toothpaste, you’d choose food. At that level, visiting a dentist isn’t even an option, and no income is disposable. Do people not face such choices?

The clues about flouride’s long-term action, and role as medication are usually avoided, because the medical curiosities that demonstrated flouride’s interaction with bone and tooth chemistry, and pointed the way to it’s discovery are possibly unsettling, and hinder the sales pitch of flouride in general.

And of course there’s the politicized paranoia of contaminating the public water supply, and who should get to decide such things, and why they might choose to do it.

But, those stories usually focus on intrigue, and don’t explain much about the chemistry of the element flourine, ionic compounds, or much of anything else, and dissolve into hand-wavey boogie men.

You basically get two incomplete pictures of the same story. What both sides leave out is that flouride has medical utility, but while toxicity is a potential risk, it’s not some mysterious subversive threat, and the benefits weigh favorably against the side effects.

Also, no one ever tells you that a little bit won’t hurt. Opponents offer hysterics of zero tolerance for poisonous toxic waste and brain damage. See also, Dr. Strangelove, and the idea of precious bodily fluids.

Meanwhile, advocates never tell you that you might be okay with flouride toothpaste just once a week, and no flouride at all the rest of the week, brushing with just pure, ordinary water (Mandrake). Instead, advocates advise twice a day, ...no more, but certainly no less.

And proponents of public flouridated water usually sidestep the premise of prescriptive public health as offering a leg up to people who might not have disposable income for toothpaste. Charity chafes all sides. Some might be too proud to accept the premise of assistance. Others bristling at the undertones of that idea amounting to other people’s needs conflicting with the autonomy of those with the capacity for choice between such options.

That science isn’t basic, considering the period in which the product was introduced. The manner of action is pretty subtle, and an impatient person seeking immediate results would not be inclined to believe in mechanisms that lack readily observable results.

This is why toothpaste’s marketing relies heavily on peer pressure and establishing trust in habitual use. Habitual use also carries the obviously juicy benefit of boosting volume and revenue.

The social mechanisms and agents operating business channels to broadly affect change in behavioral norms through obtuse, distributed influence and produce widely held beliefs with financial results for large companies and economic outcomes across an entire industry, doesn't interest me as much as other aspects surrounding the story of twentieth century medical and cosmetic products.

Namely, what toothpaste is, how it works, and the prevailing clues offered as bellwethers for its effectiveness as a preventative treatment.

This is the story of how to make something happen, whether it's useful and valuable to the individual or not. I'd rather see that story prefaced or intermingled with the details of a product's true utility, before hearing about the complicated and concerted effort to bring such a product to market (warts and all). I don't feel that such details are beyond the scope of a story of commercial success. Far from it. The mechanics of genuine utility are of paramount relevance, at least eye-to-eye with the behind-the-scenes schmoozings of success.

Missing from the story are the odd details that reveal flouride's role in dental health, and its hazards and side effects as a medication. Also missing, is the detail regarding the industrial scale source of flouride's precursors, glossed over, even with the mention of at least one aluminum company, and hints implying a nod to the war effort, prior to the start of the second world war.

It's also short on specific dates, skipping across broad periods, mentioning mostly decades as eras of activity or progress.

Flouride and dentistry are weird topics with a lot of trivia, but this article only explains the activities of businessmen operating from advantageous positions, which for the most part, given the hindsight of the article lend an almost obvious and deterministic view of the outcome of their success. It reads like the musings of an amateur hunter relishing the idea of a canned hunt.

Without including the low-level hard science of why toothpaste is effective, this story casts toothpaste in a role as seemingly empty as perhaps the Juicero juicer [0], or any number of other hollow products sold via infommercial or trumpeted alongside buzz words like Internet of Things.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juicero

Downvotes.

Good job. Keep downvoting.

Wow, a downvote for paraphrasing a wikipedia article.

  Its side length is approximately 6% larger than 
  that of the unit cube through which it passes.

I fail to see any error, based on that verbatim quote.

I'm severely disinterested in regulated social media, even moreso than social media under any other conditions.

If I can't write fiction, then why write words ever? Be it on the internet, be it on a website, be it on an extra special website that people seem to find more important than most other websites.

So, cubes have a margin of 6% play, if you need to pass any other cube through a given cube.

I'm sure there's a predictable set of interactions, with a minimum, finite set of required loops to support cellular life as we know it. Above the minimum set of operations and repeatable cycles, there are almost certainly specialty routines, and perhaps no fixed limits on diversity of optional interactions, at the cellular/chemical level.

But for sure, there is also a boundary layer, for interactions between cells. This would have to represent an almost entirely different set of chemical interaction rules for signaling, with its own constraints, minimum requirements, and optional expressions.

So, it's useful to conceptualize in terms like this, but problems solved within the context of intracellular operations will only offer clues about tissue organization, and indeed, tissue requirements may drive the optional intracellular interactions more often than not, rather than the reverse. In cases where intracellular interactions drive extracellular organization, it's essentially leaky abstractions dictating the details of higher level implementation.

Basically, fuck Getty Images for a number of reasons.

Here’s one reason in particular:

https://2600.com/print/27097

Wow, Google. Inconvenient as fuck. Put it back right away. I don’t even want to use image search anymore. Seriously fucking shitty, shitty, shitty idea.

EDIT: This is the result of litigation with Getty Images? Guess who I’m boycotting. This isn’t the first time they’ve had their fingerprints on bad news.

Did anybody else notice that this is a flying saucer?

When space releases the pressure valve, and space-faring society represents a compelling alternative.

I don't think it was there at the time, when I replied.