The future used to be much more interesting.
Check out Whale Bus:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/14/Fr...
586 karma · joined May 17, 2016
Check out Whale Bus:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/14/Fr...
They seem like the kind of technology I could have developed or even bought off the shelf in 1980. I was talking to one guy who says the security sensors to detect footfall were better decades ago.
These are the kinds of use cases I'd like to see:
1. If my house is broken into, I want intruders isolated such that they have to break down every door before they can be in contact with me. Bizarre that my internal doors should work for my ax-murderer/burglar.
2. I want my countertops/bathroom to be given a targeted UV wash. Same with handles of doors/fridges etc.
3. A complete inventory of all food in my fridge and cupboards. I could then try out new recipes depending on what I had in stock. I imagine this is within reach with present day technology.
4. Funnel daylight into fibre optic cables and into my lights so I don't use electricity for light during the day. Full colour spectrum too, can't beat free.
One smart house application I liked was smart glass which was able to alter itself depending on whether you wanted to accept radiant heat or reject it. I think these are still prototypes.
The other one I liked was the Toto Intelligence Toilet which analyzed your health from your stool/urine. Having an intelligent cupboard/fridge controlling your inputs and the toilet analyzing the outputs could genuinely put a dent in Western lifestyle diseases. I see no progress on this front except for one presentation from Toto in Japan. They don't appear to sell this anymore.
That magic mirror shit is very visually impressive. The commercial interpretations I've seen are frankly unimpressive. The hobbyists we see on Reddit and HN are doing a great job. Every bathroom and hallway mirror ought to have those abilities.
To date I don't see much that is 'smart' about smart houses. I hope to be proven wrong!
> human tendency of blaming externalities as to avoid serious self reflection
Everybody does it but you have to wonder why. What is the evolutionary purpose of denial?
Surely changing one's mind is often easier than changing the externalities, and surely the ability to change one's mind is the essence of adaption and adaptability? Or are we wrong to think so?
The only thing I can think of is that perhaps tribal signaling has a higher survival value for sinister reasons e.g. it's all very well an individual could introspect and change his/her mind but ultimately the next time there is a pogrom it better be very goddamn clear that you're a Red team/Blue team member...
Thiel has been against these misadventures to 'reform' the Middle East and he isn't a fan of democracy.
That Leo Strauss was an influence on the neocons and Thiel doesn't imply he is a neocon. That seems like a category error. It is a common failure mode on both sides of the political divide to lump different but connected groups together.
> In short, he's trying to save the world from apocalypse.
I would call that accurate in two senses. Thiel believes the world faces an existential threat and that the threat is non-fictional.
I wrote an essay with similar sentiments called "Peter & the Wolfe", where I described it as a future where the world has Alzheimers. In the fiction book 'The Book of the New Sun' there is a powerful and deeply convincing realization of what that is like. Unfortunately it is difficult to explain why without actually reading it. A more analytical understanding can be had from Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies.
If the West falls, it does not get replaced by a younger empire such as China. A power vacuum of this scale cannot be filled. What happens is that the whole world falls into universal stagnation and disrepair which takes down any incumbents with it. This is not Occidental bias, this has happened before. This is why the fate of the Roman Empire is so relevant today. When it fell, it was inhabited by Visgoths and others roleplaying as Romans. It didn't work. Unable to replicate.
People who claim a thousand years of darkness were anything but that are pulling the wool over your eyes in favour of faux sophistication. They're mistaking the periodic local maxima for global maxima because intellectuals enjoy contrarianism and poking the previous iteration of intellectuals. We cannot credibly think massive depopulations, people forgetting how to read and write, the culture retreating to more primitive forms of well, everything, is something like an alternative lifestyle choice.
I know a lot of people think this is just crazy. We have the Internet now. Surely we couldn't simply fall apart like that. But we can. The Roman Empire built an incredible network of roads and other infrastructure and they still fell prey to rot and decay. Stagnation is a very weird place to be because bits start falling off and nobody really knows why. And it always starts at the peripheral, not Washington, not New York, the provinces are the first to become dysfunctional, places in our world system like Venezuela or South Africa. They go from bad to very bad and we don't notice because we cannot tell the difference.
If we take the much vaunted abilities of humans over computers, such as creativity, and we had a human being who was brought up without any contact without any exterior sources of information such as reading materials or other humans to play with then I doubt their 'human ability' would amount to much. It'd be arguable whether they were a true human. They'd seem developmentally disabled to other humans though biologically they could be in rude health.
When you look to monkeys and other animals like ravens you find they test better than we do on a range of cognitive tasks and yet we are us and they are them. I believe there really is something different about us but that may exist at the collective level instead of the individual.
We should use the Asch Test in schools.
I probably wouldn't pick up on loss, I expect it is like enjoying real bean coffee vs the granulated matter that passes as a substitute. It takes a while for your taste buds to discern the difference and I expect it is the same for our ears.
Having said that I also have been listening to experimental ambient music so I know I enjoy the deeper vibrations you get at that level.
A typical example is Carmina Burana, which qualifies as the 'most damn German thing ever' to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXFSK0ogeg4
It's not exclusively about the pipe organ but think people on Youtube refer to examples of it as 'Epic Music', often inspired by visuals from film or gaming. If you search 'epic music' there are a huge number of channels dedicated to it.
Here's a Japanese example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7HL5wYqAbU
And the most famous example from my country:
Interstellar on church organ is intense. Feel inspired here:
Potentially this could mean an invite to Iceland for the occupant of the Ecuadorian embassy or Edward Snowden.
There are two reasons.
1. If a political actor wanted to kill off a large group of people without the government calling in the army to intervene then it would need a definite window in which to do so. It would do whatever it took to trigger the killswitch. Then it could have its merry way.
If a government wanted to do this there is not much you could do to stop them. That doesn't mean you should extend the possibility to every other political actor!
2. If things are really getting bad for any reason, you already have the power to turn off 99% of the Net by turning off the electricity supply. The hospitals and other important infrastructure already have gas or oil backup generators. That this is an option with a risk of political/economic ramifications should mean it shall not be exercised much which is all to the good.
tldr; Don't do it. You'll get manipulated by people who are smarter and more dangerous than you are.
I'm an outsider to this topic and any bio technicians/scientists are welcome to butt in, but as I see it there are at least two serious problems with the industry.
1. Eroom's Law. The cost of drug development has been going up exponentially. It doubles every nine years. Depressing charts are available from Google. Whole R&D departments at pharmaceutical companies have been shed as a result. There is only a handful of the larger pharmaceutical companies still serious about R&D, like Roche and Lily.
2. Personalized medicine, which I take to mean the use of human genomic information in tailoring drugs to individuals or subgroups of humans, it ain't happening. There are (on average) 16 new biotech drugs developed each year. Think about it for a minute. DNA discovered in 1953. Human Genome Project completes in 2003. Impact on humans... ???? I assume if we cured cancer I'd have heard about it. The wiki strongly hints the rules need to be changed for rubber to finally meet the road.
And I'm sure there's plenty more problems but that is enough to start with.
The common theme though is that these systems seem caught at a local maxima, which strongly hints that:
A: There are intrinsic limits to growth, either locally or globally. B: Institutional frameworks are holding back further growth.
Bad actors (politics) aside, I think most of the FDA wants to do the right thing. There is a strong vein of moral conviction that tends to be in the kind of people who join these sorts of organizations. At the same time this characteristic can retard change because it tends to be correlated with conservative traits. I suspect it is all about having the right incentives and some amount of bravery. In that case Jim O'Neill may be the right choice for Commissioner,
Naturally the jackals are out in force but the articles I've been reading are merely resurgent tribalism (Ahhhh! Not a member of my tribe! Hello Gizmodo.) and not a serious critique.
If anybody's interested in this subject there's a nice debate here that gives different perspectives:
http://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/fdas-caution-ha...
Just as Paul Graham talks of submarine pieces which are adverts in disguise, the same thing happens with political messages dressed up as something else.
This severely annoys me when it is in the world of fiction.
The recent Sherlock Holmes (BBC) is an extraordinary example of this. Sherlock is no longer interested in solving crimes (!!!!) when a proto-feminist movement may be behind them. Another one is readings from the Koran in Eastenders, a daytime TV soap in the UK. This sort of stuff is designed to sway the minds of the less intelligent. That is plain and simple what is going on.
I do not like it when fictional characters are telling me what to think politically. It is beyond farcical. It makes me think the message must not have any substance to it, that it would sound stupid to anybody if it were declared out loud what it was.
I think he'll be in mending bridges mode. He needs SV if he is serious about reform.
On the other hand the Media had their Red Wedding.
“It was like a fucking firing squad,” one source said of the encounter.
I wonder what it's like to be shouted at by somebody with access to nuclear weapons.
Areas of low pressure have a colloquial name. Storms.
I suggest you come back to this thread on a different day and re-read it. Or give it to somebody else with a neutral, uninvested perspective to read. The mention I made of houses controlling pressure was merely a hypothetical as I previously stressed. Everything else I said followed from the understanding that low pressure areas are storms. Storms move air. Air that now contains large quantities of pollen.
What are your thoughts on vacuum insulation panels?
They have incredible R values, but leak over time. Do you see them being used in the housing of the future? I know somebody in Canada (the Leaf) is using them for a Tiny House project.
The chain of causality was this:
Low pressure causing high pollen density causing respiratory illness.
This has the power to explain why large numbers of people were abruptly affected. It's all there in the article.
"Last week hospitals were overwhelmed when after a cool change and storm caused respiratory problems for thousands ... The humid weather change last Monday caused pollen, most likely from rye grass, to burst into tiny particles that were able to be inhaled through the nose and enter the lungs."
And I repeat myself from 20 hours ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13109702
https://purosound.com/products/iem-200-studio-grade-in-ear-h...
They do a nice reasonably priced line of headphones and earphones which won't exceed 85 dB. They also sell an adapter for 20 bucks if you already have headphones.
The sound quality is good. I wouldn't recommend db logic earphones because although they volume limit to 85 dB the sound quality isn't great.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-29/thunderstorm-asthma-ei...
"An eighth person has died following last week's freak thunderstorm asthma event in Melbourne, health authorities have said.
One person remains in a critical condition in intensive care, the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services said.
Last week hospitals were overwhelmed when after a cool change and storm caused respiratory problems for thousands of people, with more than 8,500 attending emergency departments."
"It caused many people, including those who had no history of asthma or respiratory issues, to experience mild to severe breathing difficulties."
"The humid weather change last Monday caused pollen, most likely from rye grass, to burst into tiny particles that were able to be inhaled through the nose and enter the lungs."
The good name of Russian Meteorology is exonerated from charges of pseudoscience.
They are that airtight. That is why they put in mechanical ventilation such as HRV and ERV. The houses are that air tight that off-gassing is a problem once they get down below 0.6 ACH @ 50 pascals as they do in passive house builds.
> If you run a large negative pressure in a typical house, you also risk carbon monoxide poisoning from sucking exhaust from the furnace into the living space.
It happens, I read this the other week.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TinyHouses/comments/5ec33i/the_big_...
> They use air pressure this way specifically because construction is not airtight. If you run a negative pressure differential (which requires a pretty beefy blower to accomplish and isn't very energy efficient), you end up pulling air in from all the gaps and cracks and porous materials, which means that contaminated air is not going into all the gaps and cracks and porous materials.
I understand why a negative pressure room works. The linked to Wikipedia page explains it. They are an example of manipulating air pressure to affect an outcome.
What I don't understand is what point you're trying to make.
If it is that the air tightness of a house coupled with a HRV is not sufficient to effect barometric pressure on a human body, then I already acknowledged that might be so. It also might be sufficient, which is why suggested getting an expert's opinion.
Of course journalists will never consider that their enterprise would require reform. They are used to being the question makers and opinion formers.
I suspect if we got rid of them all the world would be no worse off. People would communicate to each other as before and nothing of value would be lost. Perhaps less coordination of mind-share is what we need. Does anybody seriously believe our political systems improved with the availability of 24 hour news? Perhaps our political leaders should not be available on camera at all. I don't see what the argument is that more journalism and televisual display somehow made politics better. It made it more theatrical and less practical. How was that supposed to improve governance?
tldr; They don't like it up 'em.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-04/thunderstorm-asthma-wa...
If changes in barometric pressure change how pollen is dispersed then wearing a mask might be the right answer for a person with respiratory problems.
It may be possible to have a fine degree of control over air pressure in today's high spec houses because of their high air tightness requirements.
I don't know that it is possible, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was because they are so tight they have to employ mechanical ventilation. I know hospitals employ air pressure as a way of controlling for disease spreading.
Barometric pressure directly affects your ability to breathe.
Recently several people died by asthma attack in Australia and thousands of people with no preexisting history of respiratory illness suddenly developed symptoms. The most likely explanation so far was the sudden change in barometric pressure and high pollen counts.
If atmospheric pressure decreases it shall lower your blood pressure.
http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-pre...
More generally, weather has a direct effect on mood and behaviour.
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2008/11/09/weather-can...
There is a litany of reasons why. Mostly on the "I agree in principal but..." basis. Here are three.
1. The Big Bang.
A change as drastic as UBI should be introduced gradually. Fucking up on this scale would have enormous repercussions. For instance: one could gradually lower the age of retirement until everyone is retired (or you could lower taxes, or discount healthcare... you get the idea).
If these are untenable propositions, then UBI definitely is.
2. Poison In The Well.
If the government is the arbiter of UBI funds, then it gains a type of power it currently does not possess. If there exists criteria for taking UBI away from an individual or group, then the government has the ability to 'tone police' (like China's social credit system) in a way which has more in common with authoritarian dictatorships than a Western style state. Having the autonomy of providing your own food, shelter and other resources enables you to have political independence even if everybody doesn't like you. Not so under UBI. Your economic state is hitched such that only the wealthy now have the right to political opinions. Moral panics should not be able to affect funding.
The left and right shall tear UBI apart like a rag doll and it could even become the fulcrum through which a civil war begins. If people feel a threat to their source of food exists you'd have an Arab Spring situation.
3. The Parasite Traveller.
There is a contradiction between UBI and having open borders. You must have very close to closed borders to citizens of poorer countries or UBI states which are less wealthy.
You have to choose between values. There is no state on this planet capable of UBI for all.
Without Darwin's visits to the islands and South America his ideas would have remained dormant. The same is true of reading a good book. You may have had those ideas before in some tangential form, but now you see them fully realized on the page. A single turn of phrase can make an idea click.
I also enjoy things such as The Sequences (general rationality heuristics), so it is a paradox.
In America or the UK I know this would be dismissed as 'woo'.
Unless it was contextualized correctly of course. Such as between friends or within a relevant domain like medicine.
Sometimes I worry we might be retarded.