[Rezwan]

Do you think he’s really gone or is he bluffing?

Hmm. We might need some more robust moderation around these forums. I’m pretty laissez-faire

So:

When I try to point out fundamental limitations in knowledge, I am repeatedly insulted.

And

They know everything. Then a person like me comes along and ruins it. I say, “Wait a minute, you know a whole lot of that stuff you learned and were told is gospel, it’s not actually truth. It’s incomplete. Or it’s blatant corruption for political or economic reasons.” I don’t say it in such terms. I merely question conventional wisdom as regards understanding of physics. And as the book “Blink” indicates. people instantly perceive this as destructive to their entire concept of reality, the entire basis for their self confidence.

I don’t think that’s the issue. People know they don’t know. They just think you don’t know even less. But this is also a matter of style, or focal distance. E.g., most people just want practical, rough approximations of knowledge that work in an engineering or consumer sense. Going into the ultimate unreality or limitation of knowledge feels more like an intellectual exercise. A bit exhausting, only worth it if you like that sort of thing.

Anyway, he’s gone. Hopefully he will find superior people to resonate with.

Meanwhile folks, let’s keep it clean, or I may change my laissez-faire ways.

This makes me grow nostalgic for John Astin, in the Brothers O’Toole:

Michael O’Toole: I have, in my time, visited three political conventions, four sessions of congress, and two homes for the criminally insane. I have known army generals, steam doctors, vegetarians, prohibitionists, and a female suffragette. But never, even in an Orangeman’s Day parade, have I seen such pure and stainless brainlessness as I now behold in you. The Almighty, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, has given the worm enough sense to turn with, and the barnacle can grasp whatever happens to be standing by. But you are equipped with a mental capacity smaller than you were born with. Here we are, benighted in the middle of a nowhere named Molly-Be-Damn – a dreary little rookery, Timothy, a squalid sty, a festering pustule on the face of the western slope. Bless the town and bless the people! Look at them – the rabble of this cantankerous community! Knaves and fools, louts and lardheads, the least of all God’s creatures, without enough push to pick the fleas off each other, abiding in putrefaction and inertia, curled up comfy in it like hogs in a mud hole! And while I, of all people, fret and sweat for a way to pull these Simple Simons out of the bog, you stand around making flatulent noises for the titillation of the vulgar mob. And while he’s bubbling himself, what are you doing, you pusillanimous pack of popcorn pickers? You clattered clutch of clucks? The town dilapidating around you, coasting downhill in a handcart to Hell while you stand about gaping for flies and going patty-cake with your hands!
Mayor: There now! Now just one minute you!
Michael O’Toole: All right, all right, all right! Fine! Keep it, and treasure it the way it is! For when all this trash has collapsed into one pile, and the howling wilderness has claimed its own again, I want you hicks to be happy, belching and spitting, laughing and singing, swinging from tree to tree, with your friend Soapy Sam here, the Uriah Heep of the hookworm belt, standing around below waiting to steal anything that falls to the ground. If a nut should drop and fall – leave it lying there. It’s probably my little brother Timothy.
Sheriff: Is that all?
[O’Toole throws up his hands]
Sheriff: [Crowd applauds]
Sheriff: By acclamation – the winner of the cussin’ contest – Michael O’Toole!

[Rezwan]

OK, Here’s a crude table to give an idea of the criteria and how the contenders might compare.

The criteria need to be better developed – especially to come up with equivalent units for measuring.

The candidates need to be listed.

The info for each candidate needs to be filled in.

That’s content.

As to structure, I have to set up a weblog with all the criteria fields. New fields can always be added, so even with partial list we’re OK. Info can be filled in/updated as it comes.

Then – one day we can get really fancy and set up some code to compare different fusion alternatives like they compare cameras on CNET.

OK. This one’s a collaborative project. Let’s work on the left column so I have the fields to set up a contender weblog, and an SAEF form and give permission to people to fill in contenders. We’ll see how it works.

Attached files

Contenders.doc (48 B) 

[Rezwan]

ok, will do. As to the avi – how annoying. I’ve set it to upload “all” types. So I have an email over on the expression engine forum asking why avi doesn’t upload. “all” should mean “all”.

As to narration (Derek sent a comment – can’t find it! Was it telepathy?) “Chatty tone”- Actually, I wish that was someone else’s voice. I cringe at my own. also, recorded it with “noise reduction” on, which makes it sound tinny and mechanical, like Dr. Hawking.

[Rezwan]

Another video capture question – is there some software for windows where you can record a clip of a playing movie? There are bits from the house hearing or google videos that I want to capture and work into a film (E.g., statements by senators, or others). I think government footage is public domain, right?

So: 2 questions:
1. What is fair use of videos out there.
2. How do I capture said footage. I know for mac there was this “SnapProZ” thing…

[Rezwan]

Breakable: I think it’s best to think of these as segments in a larger series. Each segment has a concept to convey that builds up to the whole advocacy series.

The purpose of this segment is to just explain how the DPF works.

I think for the beginner it’s too quick. You first need to set up what plasma is, and also what fusion is. I’m worried because here I show hydrogen boron fusion, which looks like fission because it splits. That’s bound to confuse some. Also, the machine hasn’t even been tested yet for hydrogen boron – that’s what LPP is doing now! So we probably need some sort of disclaimer there somewhere about how this is being tested. However, that this machine results in fusion is proven and established, with deuterium.

So, yes, it will be a few films, and we’ll have to ask people to watch them in the proper order, but they need to be able to stand on their own. And they need to work together to build a case.

Warwick: Thanks! It’s details like that that I’m looking for. Yes, it’ll be easy to change the + and -. I added those as title overlays to the animation. I had no idea about the color. This is terrible. A time will come when I need to cut a wire to disable a bomb, and I’ll cut the blue wire! Disaster!

Well, we’ve already committed to Vegas – OK, it was $110, not such a huge committment, but the time spent to figure out how it works is. The issue is that this is the consumer version. You pay more for better sound manipulation. Sound – what an art. I am in awe of people that do sound tracks. As with any tool, I think the real issue is finding people who are good at using it. Either through creative commons or through hiring skilled people – we can up the quality. For now, there’s just me. Creative commons also means going back to the website, setting it up to support that, putting in legal/practical guidelines for use. And then a lot of data entry/uploading of images and footage… Many images of which people wouldn’t understand.

What I’d prefer is people in the area coming down and working on the actual video footage in house for now. I think Eric would prefer more oversight as well.

It’s all evolving. Our process.

Belbear: It makes a very interesting sound. It’s like synthesizer music. I’ll have to capture that. We’ve got it caught via the video camera mic, but it’s not the greatest capture and there’s hiss and noise around it. Would be fun to capture it with better audio equipment (any suggestions?). Maybe worth hiring a pro for an hour to come down.

Another cool sound is the vacuum pumping away. It’s a constant background shuffling sound.

[Rezwan]

Brian H wrote: That sounds like a screwy system!
I’ve seen ones where two switches in the same position = on, and in different positions = off. In that instance, you just throw the switch whichever way is available if you want to change the luminescent state of the light. Of course, if you want, you could get confused by that. But it takes effort.

Your electrician may vary.

I once drove on the left. Cape Town. Oh! And another time in Tokyo. In Cape Town, there was a zebra crossing – for real! No, I jest, but you could see a bunch off the highway. Wait a minute, was tokyo left side? I believe it was.

It’s not that hard to make the switch – the hardest part is shifting gears with the left hand. Manual cars. But once you do it, your brain adjusts. Like being in mirror world. Parallel parking was surreal. At least it’s not like Iran with a ditch by the side of every road. Miss it and you fall in.

OK, so the conversation has shifted far from capacitors. No worry I guess. The guys have decided it’s mostly a conditioning issue and have been firing repeatedly to condition. By last night it was down to 4 capacitors that are still holding out.

[Rezwan]

Like that part “for a few millionths of a second, energy flows from the outer to the inner electrode through the gas” – that doesn’t match the pictures. We need an arrow or something showing electricity…because that blue stuff is the gas that has now become gathered.

Would wavy lines of energy work?

This is why I think another video on “what is plasma” is required. But hey! They are probably out there already. You may already know where they are! How convenient.

[Rezwan]

Brian H wrote: Rather like the ones on the wall I gather. Up is on, down is off.

Gone are the simple days. Since we dropped the trade barriers, all kinds of nefarious practices have become common. I speak of the dual switch fiasco. You have one switch at one entry, and another on the other side of the room. So if you turn one up/on, the one on the other side is now down/on. This leads to new combinations.

Of course, some of the switches don’t get it. “Oh, I see. I was up/on yesterday, and then the person switched my counterpart up/off, so now the light is off, but, dear me – they’re switching me and nothing seems to be happening…”

It’s a conspiracy. They know we’re lazy and they just want to get us to cross that room – again and again.

This is what happens when you let standards lapse. Chaos. Inconvenience.

[Rezwan]

Auspicious first image upload. I generally take a dim view of such language in the forums. However, with the literary value added via irony, and because I can relate (I’m thinking of my adorable, acquisitive niece), we’ll let it slide.

[Rezwan]

dash wrote: I guess that’s a feed lot. All in all it didn’t look especially inhumane.

OK. Invite a thousand people over, have them all poop in your house until the floor is covered. Then hang out in your house. Until you die.

Then get back to me on your concept of “humane”.

[Rezwan]

Warwick wrote:
Except that many people would be perfectly justified, in today’s world, to correctly assume that someone else will have your job if you don’t kill yourself working. And the idea that “the hoarding survivalist generations will pass” supposes incorrectly that long work-weeks are a voluntary choice on behalf of the employed.

Work is so uneven. I know a lot of people who have to maintain the appearance of working at work, but are really surfing the internet. Others who work like dogs. I’m not sure we have it so bad compared to the generations of yore who woke up at 4 am every day to milk the cows or who worked the 12 hour shifts in the factories. And in Iran, few people seem to work at all. Posing at the office, getting a paycheck from oil dollars. Some unlucky people doing really difficult unpleasant work. Many people living off the paychecks of a few… very unproductive society. And that pesky “Matthew effect” adding to the unfairness of it all.

By “hoarding survivalist generation” – I didn’t mean it was their voluntary choice, but they have been conditioned. Of course, circumstances have to change first. We have to be in a defacto world of effectively unlimited resources, such as one with unlimited energy…

Wait. No, that’s not it. Maybe we’re all hoarders, no matter what. Human nature. I think there’s plenty to go around now if we weren’t such hoarders. But you see how shrill people get when someone tries to suggest sharing and such. So, I don’t think, given our nature, we can share. The only solution is to not have to share, to live in a world of unlimited resources. In other words, I guess I give up on people. They are at heart, little petty creatures. Who really make things unpleasant for each other. So let them drown in sugar and abundance!

Hmm. That’s depressing. I didn’t realize the implications of my thoughts. I must meditate on this. I don’t think it’s coming from a good place.

I shall take a rest from posting and get back to what I was supposed to work on as well!

[Rezwan]

Warwick wrote: …but it’s never going to replace what we basically need – soil-grown crops, grown organically and sustainably.

I’d love to see more acreage given over to organic farming, and also to gratuitous growing of heirloom plants with no consumption value. Pure biodiversity exercises.

However, I don’t know that I equate “organically grown” with basic human food needs or even sustainability. “Sustainable” being defined as something you can keep doing in perpetuity. I think with the numbers of people involved, and nitrogen fixing limitations or un-fertilized soil, you’d get more bang for your buck with food sky scrapers replacing soil farms. Artificial, sure, but productive and meeting most basic food requirements rather cheaply. The bulk of soil farming today is mono-cropping that destroys soil, so you may as well figure out the issues of the hydroponic farms and do the same thing with less land.

So you’d have a mixed portfolio of the cheap, mass produced stuff, and more land being diverted to higher end organic stuff.

Have you read “Omnivore’s Dilemma?”

Have you driven by Harris ranch on the 5 freeway?

[Rezwan]

dash wrote: The company then did a bit of research and now knows the timing of the hatchings, and they always turn the lights off during this time. As far as I know there were no environmentalists involved, no government intervention. Just the people in the company who had the power to make decisions decided what was the thing to do given the circumstances.

AWWWW! What a tear jerker. Those misguided turtles finding the moon. It would be great PR for that company to make an ad out about this. Especially if it’s an annual occurrence. Goodwill may get them more market share. In any case, I’d like to see it.

[Rezwan]

Brian H wrote: Both analogies are false. We’re neither. Food is not a problem, except insofar as people attempt to generalize and super-size regional diets like sushi, which will almost certainly shortly delete bluefins from the wild. As for farming, there are many ways to skin that carrot; check out urban hi-rise farms, e.g. And FF power makes all sorts of other models viable.

Brian, could you try to just include the parts of the quote you are actually referring to? Like, you can go back in and delete most of Warwick’s quote, and just leave that last sentence about the rabbits and foxes, which is, what I think, you’re referring to.

It would make it easier to see what you’re talking about and clear the clutter.

Pet peeve of mine.

Thanks!

[Rezwan]

Warwick wrote: And yes if we all live in Texas there will be no lack of room for wildlife, but since that hasn’t happened yet, we’re kind of spread out and like to build lots of roads and cars. Rezwan’s flying cars will be here one day maybe, then we can just kill birds, but I think that for the average subsistence farmer in the majority world, that day is a long way off. It’s been shown many times that the effect of dividing up wildwood with roads is that the ecosystem fails – all the larger species need to cross the roads and if they can’t they’re screwed. We could imagine a different world where is some weird and wonderful rural public transport, but let’s not bet on it.

“All my exes live in Texas, that’s why I live in Tennessee.”

BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) goes underground through the city of Berkeley, instead of above ground as it does in most other cities. This is because the good citizens and their elected officials thought that a rail system would bisect the city and create an “other side of the tracks” situation, which they didn’t like.

So, they paid double the price per mile to stick the whole thing under. Choice. Affluence. Trade offs, values.

I don’t see that it would cost that much to take certain portions of roads and stick them underground or raise them above at certain spots that coincide with migration routes.

Or, better yet, to become a people that pays more attention to migration patterns. Like surfers who check the tides, we’d have people linked in to migrations, getting data from some of the herd that are tagged with gps linked speed and directional sensors. (Like how they have sig alerts on the internet – you can see the rate of traffic flow on all the major freeways in LA – probably everywhere).

Perhaps we’d have cowboys, too. Or girlscouts and boyscouts all out there getting their migration badges or whatever. [Note: the massive animal migration incompatibility with human civilization/property/transport is one of the issues I’m most interested in exploring. It’s next in line after fusion for my big issues. Oh, maybe water cycle – well, that overlaps with both.]

I suspect that, as we solve the affluence problem and get rid of this sense of fear and survival and miserly possessiveness that people have which makes them see everything as property they must hoard and control – perspective on nature will shift, and become much more interesting.

It’s the limited resources paradigm, after all, that is behind a lot of things that are supposedly for our sake, but really are not what we want. Take those commercials where someone has a headache, and they take a pill and feel better. The person is shown at a grueling job, where they can’t miss a second, but because of the pill, they get to stay on the job. Yippee.

Obviously, evil employers are behind that ad. If your employee has splitting headaches, their body is telling them to get rest and change their lifestyle. Many employers just see the workers as tools, want them to ignore the sensible message from their bodies to get rest. So they vilify the headache, and not the insane work hours, and work to solve the symptom (headache), and not the cause of the headache (life out of balance).

All of that is possible, is reinforced, under a survivalist mentality, where you’re worried someone else will take your job if you don’t kill yourself working, or the Chinese will control market share, or whatever. Zero sum self and nature exploitation. Very boring. And I don’t think it reflects reality. But people do get shrill about it.

This is often couched in terms of “efficiency”.

The temptation of efficiency is strong, and certainly, efficiency has its place. But I think a big part of human essence is inefficiency, gratuitous exploration, play. Hopefully, this will assert itself more as years go by. The grumpy hoarding survivalist generations will pass, and the emerging generations will be a lot more groovy about it all. More integrated with natural patterns, setting their clocks by wildebeest migrations, very happy to have excuses to not go to work for 3 weeks at a time while roads are closed.

[Author]

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