Month: April 2017

The Blood of the Crab

Horseshoe crab blood is an irreplaceable medical marvel—and so biomedical companies are bleeding 500K every year. Can this creature that’s been around since the dinosaurs be saved? He’d like to eventually take some of his discoveries to the medical labs with the hope that they can improve their bleeding practices. If we know the bleeding process reduces the crab’s hemocyanin, which compromises their immune system, feeding them a diet of copper before they are returned to the water might help bring their hemocyanin levels back up. He’d like to sell the idea to the bleeding labs. But to date, his attempts to reach them, —even to simply confirm that their bleeding simulations are accurate —have gone unanswered.

Galaxy Colonization Highest Good

Right now, outside of Earth, the universe as we know it is full of vast empty spaces, fiery stars, and lifeless planets. It’s beautiful, but it’s as dead as a rock. I, for one, would not want to be a rock. Being a human is wonderful, but even being a monkey or a dog or a bird would be better than being a rock. There is more happiness and pleasure (and whatever else makes life worth living) in a single bird than there is in the whole known universe outside of Earth. That would no longer be the case if humanity colonizes outer space.

Unified tyranny would be difficult to maintain across the vast distances of outer space.

To get a sense of the possibilities, consider a Dyson swarm, which is a series of structures that a civilization could place around a star to collect its radiation. If humanity builds a Dyson swarm around the sun, we could get a billion times more energy than from Earth. That alone would enable a huge improvement, but then note that the Milky Way has a few 100B stars. A network of Dyson swarms could power a massive galactic civilization that utterly dwarfs anything we can achieve on Earth. However much good we may be able to do by making the world a better place is utterly dwarfed by making the universe a better place.

and a counterpoint

These facts make it look hopeless for a governing system to effectively coordinate law enforcement activities, judicial decisions, and so on, across cosmic distances. The universe is simply too big for a government to establish law and order in a top-down fashion.

But there is another strategy for achieving peace: Future civilizations could use a policy of deterrence to prevent other civilizations from launching first strikes.

82 year old DJ

“She’s got this energy that goes beyond age, and that can equal any young person’s here”. Her sound is fundamentally techno music with jazz, French chanson and classical music mixed in. Ever curious and never one to give up her dreams, she hopes one day to debut on the New York club scene

Subway Rave

This video gets more and more fun as it goes on. Passengers on the Bakerloo line on a London tube train were privy to a pop-up rave Monday night. At first, drum’n’bass MC Harry Shotta acts like an unsuspecting passenger, sitting behind a newspaper on a seat. He looks up in surprise as music suddenly blasts through a sound system and lights begin to flash. Then it turns into a full-on rave. Another DJ calls up Shotta and asks what his name is. When he answers “Harry Shotta” the passengers cheer, and then they are rewarded with a great show. Never has a subway ride looked so exciting.

The shoelace mystery

The scientists expected that the knots would come undone slowly. But their slow-motion footage — focused on the shoelaces of a runner on a treadmill — showed that the knots rapidly failed within 1 or 2 strides. To figure out why, O’Reilly and his colleagues used an accelerometer on the tongue of a shoe to measure the forces acting on a knot. They found that when walking, the combined impact and acceleration on a shoelace totals a whopping 7G

Furry Convention

One furry named DeoTasDevil, who I’m assuming is a large tasmanian devil, criticized a convention (they have conventions) for allowing other furries to threaten her. That’s my read of the situation, at least, but apparently there’s some huge, convoluted background to the whole damn thing that involves something called “raiders” and shit. You can read that whole story on the Furry News Website (those are 3 words I never thought I’d place together in my life) Dogpatch Press. As you would expect from people who have built what appears to be their entire lives around the image of themselves as a giant animal, the response of the convention organization, Rocky Mountain Fur Con, was…completely reasonable.

Principles As Exhaustible Resources

I think of respect for free speech as a commons. Every time some group invokes free speech to say something controversial, they’re drawing from the commons – which is fine, that’s what the commons is there for. Presumably the commons self-replenishes at some slow rate as people learn philosophy or get into situations where free speech protects them and their allies. But if you draw from the commons too quickly, then the commons disappears. When trolls say the most outrageous things possible, then retreat to “oh, but free speech”, they’re burning the commons for no reason, to the detriment of everybody else who needs it.