As far as anyone seems to know, he’s the largest private cave owner in the United States. Ackerman displayed an almost religious devotion to these fragile places and a certain sadness that far too few people seemed to share it, especially now that he’s getting old and the future of his domain is looking murky. His children have embarked on above-ground careers, with little interest in committing to the security, maintenance, and management of his below-ground assets. With no clear heir, and no one with the combined resources and dedication to preside over 64km of caves, Ackerman has considered putting the land in a trust, leaving it to his caving club, or even attempting to work something out with his longtime enemies at the DNR as a last-ditch option.
Month: June 2020
Foundation
looks promising, but sucks that it is on a little-known streaming platform.
Ettore Majorana
Today, this mathematical curiosity of 1932 still represents a powerful source of new ideas. In this paper there are the first hints for supersymmetry, spin-mass correlation and spontaneous symmetry breaking – 3 fundamental concepts underpinning the Standard Model and beyond. Our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature was already in Majorana’s attempts to describe particles with arbitrary spins in a relativistically invariant way.
Plasma market failure
Countries that follow the WHOs guidance to rely exclusively on voluntary, unpaid donors all have shortages of plasma. So what do these countries do? Import plasma from the paid-donor countries
SETI Limits
there should be at least 36 civilizations within our Galaxy: this is a lower limit, based on the assumption that the average life-time, L, of a communicating civilization is 100 years. If spread uniformly throughout the Galaxy this would imply that the nearest CETI is at most 17K light-years away, and most likely hosted by a low-mass M-dwarf star, far surpassing our ability to detect it for the foreseeable future
Por-Bajin
In Mongolia, a mysterious island ruin Is giving up its secrets. It is now possible to combine tree rings with atmospheric carbon dating to get to yearly precision.
The 5 Borough Bikeway
a plan for more bike lanes in nyc. doesn’t go far enough.
Permanent Assumptions
More people wake up every morning wanting to solve problems than wake up looking to cause harm
Nothing too good or too bad stays that way forever
A big group of people can get smarter and better informed over time. But they can’t, on average, become more patient, less greedy, or more level-headed during periods of upheaval.
Virtual conferences
some more ideas how to bring serendipity to virtual conferences
Instagram Look Dies
As Instagram has grown to more than 1b monthly users, it has ushered in a very particular aesthetic: bright walls; artfully arranged lattes and avocado toast; and millennial-pink everything, all with that carefully staged, color-corrected, glossy-looking aesthetic. Photos that play into these trends perform so well on Instagram that the look became synonymous with the platform itself, then seeped into the broader world. But every trend has a shelf life, and as quickly as Instagram ushered in pink walls and pastel macaroons, it’s now turning on them. “Avocado toast and posts on the beach. It’s so generic and played out at this point. You can photoshop any girl into that background and it will be the same post. It’s not cool anymore to be manufactured.”
the sooner all this garbage burns to the ground, the better.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 