The God Equation

[gepr]

https://bookshop.org/books/the-god-equation-the-quest-for-a-theory-of-everything-9780593396445/9780385542746

I'm tempted to buy this book. I doubt I will. But one of the sentences in the blurb triggered me:

"This would be the crowning achievement of science, a profound merging of all the forces of nature into one beautiful, magnificent equation to unlock the deepest mysteries in science: ..."

Why "equation"? What is this obsession with equality or equivalence or even similarity/symmetry? OK. I get it, equations help us ask questions like "How does this thing over here transmogrify into that thing over there?" And if you have a bunch of terms in the equation, you can "solve" for this thing or that thing as a function of those other things.

But why should any 1 thing from an N-tuple of things necessarily be representable in terms of the remaining N-1 things? Where does that urge come from? It sounds like a need for cognitive closure [⛧]. It dovetails nicely with the free will thread where everyone's convinced of their own brain farts and fond of giving authoritarian answers even though the emperor's nude.

The interview that sent me to Kaku's book is here: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/03/string-theory-michio-kaku-aliens-god-equation-large-hadron-collider
wherein he suggests the Multiverse can help harmonize religious beliefs! I'm tempted into pseudoscience nonsense to think that a feeling of free will (and the more collective "adjacent possible") is not justified by some meso-scopic biological evolutionary purpose, but because it's possible to see the "shadows" of other universes [⛤]. 8^D


[⛧] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1997-06343-011
[⛤] I think I'm getting that from Deutsch's Fabric of Reality ... but who knows at this point?

--
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

[Marcus G. Daniels]

But wait, there's more!  https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgqygg/hard-science-of-reincarnation-past-lives

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 11:09 AM
To: FriAM <[hidden email]>
Subject: [FRIAM] The God Equation


https://bookshop.org/books/the-god-equation-the-quest-for-a-theory-of-everything-9780593396445/9780385542746

I'm tempted to buy this book. I doubt I will. But one of the sentences in the blurb triggered me:

"This would be the crowning achievement of science, a profound merging of all the forces of nature into one beautiful, magnificent equation to unlock the deepest mysteries in science: ..."

Why "equation"? What is this obsession with equality or equivalence or even similarity/symmetry? OK. I get it, equations help us ask questions like "How does this thing over here transmogrify into that thing over there?" And if you have a bunch of terms in the equation, you can "solve" for this thing or that thing as a function of those other things.

But why should any 1 thing from an N-tuple of things necessarily be representable in terms of the remaining N-1 things? Where does that urge come from? It sounds like a need for cognitive closure [⛧]. It dovetails nicely with the free will thread where everyone's convinced of their own brain farts and fond of giving authoritarian answers even though the emperor's nude.

The interview that sent me to Kaku's book is here: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/03/string-theory-michio-kaku-aliens-god-equation-large-hadron-collider
wherein he suggests the Multiverse can help harmonize religious beliefs! I'm tempted into pseudoscience nonsense to think that a feeling of free will (and the more collective "adjacent possible") is not justified by some meso-scopic biological evolutionary purpose, but because it's possible to see the "shadows" of other universes [⛤]. 8^D


[⛧] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1997-06343-011
[⛤] I think I'm getting that from Deutsch's Fabric of Reality ... but who knows at this point?

--
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

[Stephen Guerin-5]

 

Marcus writes:

Why "equation"? What is this obsession with equality or equivalence or even similarity/symmetry? OK. I get it, equations help us ask questions like "How does this thing over here transmogrify into that thing over there?" And if you have a bunch of terms in the equation, you can "solve" for this thing or that thing as a function of those other things.

I agree with your questioning, Marcus. Personally, if there is a unified theory, I think it will come in the form of an algorithm and not equation. In the same way natural selection is more of an algorithm than an equation. Of course, my personal Quixotic ranting on Dual Field Theory / Bi-Directional Path Tracing is of the algorithmic type. :-)

David Krakauer speaks eloquently about if there is ever a Unified Theory in complexity will probably be in the form of a computer program (algorithmic).
  https://youtu.be/0lDryEt80-g?t=108
  I linked to that point in the 1-hour talk, but highly recommend Friam folk listen to the whole bit as David hits on a lot of points raised on the list. 

Brian Arthur makes a similar point of the gradual transition of representation in Science from equations to computationa/algorithmic and points out that science took 500 years to transition from representing numbers in Roman numerals to Arabic numerals. He sees the transition to computational representations to take maybe 50 years (we're probably 30-years into it).

-S
_____________________________________________________________________

On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 12:09 PM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <[hidden email]> wrote:

https://bookshop.org/books/the-god-equation-the-quest-for-a-theory-of-everything-9780593396445/9780385542746

I'm tempted to buy this book. I doubt I will. But one of the sentences in the blurb triggered me:

"This would be the crowning achievement of science, a profound merging of all the forces of nature into one beautiful, magnificent equation to unlock the deepest mysteries in science: ..."

Why "equation"? What is this obsession with equality or equivalence or even similarity/symmetry? OK. I get it, equations help us ask questions like "How does this thing over here transmogrify into that thing over there?" And if you have a bunch of terms in the equation, you can "solve" for this thing or that thing as a function of those other things.

But why should any 1 thing from an N-tuple of things necessarily be representable in terms of the remaining N-1 things? Where does that urge come from? It sounds like a need for cognitive closure [⛧]. It dovetails nicely with the free will thread where everyone's convinced of their own brain farts and fond of giving authoritarian answers even though the emperor's nude.

The interview that sent me to Kaku's book is here: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/03/string-theory-michio-kaku-aliens-god-equation-large-hadron-collider
wherein he suggests the Multiverse can help harmonize religious beliefs! I'm tempted into pseudoscience nonsense to think that a feeling of free will (and the more collective "adjacent possible") is not justified by some meso-scopic biological evolutionary purpose, but because it's possible to see the "shadows" of other universes [⛤]. 8^D


[⛧] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1997-06343-011
[⛤] I think I'm getting that from Deutsch's Fabric of Reality ... but who knows at this point?

--
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

[Marcus G. Daniels]

That was Glen.   (My explanation is just that we have limited short term memory and can’t tolerate any other representation than terribly compressed forms.   So it is hard to gain confidence in simulations because we can’t get them entirely in our heads, nor prove them correct, nor reason very effectively about how mutations will change their behavior.   The natural world has no such hesitation.)

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Stephen Guerin
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 11:57 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation

 

 

Marcus writes:

Why "equation"? What is this obsession with equality or equivalence or even similarity/symmetry? OK. I get it, equations help us ask questions like "How does this thing over here transmogrify into that thing over there?" And if you have a bunch of terms in the equation, you can "solve" for this thing or that thing as a function of those other things.

I agree with your questioning, Marcus. Personally, if there is a unified theory, I think it will come in the form of an algorithm and not equation. In the same way natural selection is more of an algorithm than an equation. Of course, my personal Quixotic ranting on Dual Field Theory / Bi-Directional Path Tracing is of the algorithmic type. :-)

 

David Krakauer speaks eloquently about if there is ever a Unified Theory in complexity will probably be in the form of a computer program (algorithmic).
  https://youtu.be/0lDryEt80-g?t=108
  I linked to that point in the 1-hour talk, but highly recommend Friam folk listen to the whole bit as David hits on a lot of points raised on the list. 

Brian Arthur makes a similar point of the gradual transition of representation in Science from equations to computationa/algorithmic and points out that science took 500 years to transition from representing numbers in Roman numerals to Arabic numerals. He sees the transition to computational representations to take maybe 50 years (we're probably 30-years into it).

-S
_____________________________________________________________________

[hidden email]

CEO, Simtable  http://www.simtable.com

1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505

office: [phone] mobile: [phone]

twitter: @simtable

zoom.simtable.com

 

 

On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 12:09 PM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <[hidden email]> wrote:

https://bookshop.org/books/the-god-equation-the-quest-for-a-theory-of-everything-9780593396445/9780385542746

I'm tempted to buy this book. I doubt I will. But one of the sentences in the blurb triggered me:

"This would be the crowning achievement of science, a profound merging of all the forces of nature into one beautiful, magnificent equation to unlock the deepest mysteries in science: ..."

Why "equation"? What is this obsession with equality or equivalence or even similarity/symmetry? OK. I get it, equations help us ask questions like "How does this thing over here transmogrify into that thing over there?" And if you have a bunch of terms in the equation, you can "solve" for this thing or that thing as a function of those other things.

But why should any 1 thing from an N-tuple of things necessarily be representable in terms of the remaining N-1 things? Where does that urge come from? It sounds like a need for cognitive closure [⛧]. It dovetails nicely with the free will thread where everyone's convinced of their own brain farts and fond of giving authoritarian answers even though the emperor's nude.

The interview that sent me to Kaku's book is here: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/03/string-theory-michio-kaku-aliens-god-equation-large-hadron-collider
wherein he suggests the Multiverse can help harmonize religious beliefs! I'm tempted into pseudoscience nonsense to think that a feeling of free will (and the more collective "adjacent possible") is not justified by some meso-scopic biological evolutionary purpose, but because it's possible to see the "shadows" of other universes [⛤]. 8^D


[⛧] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1997-06343-011
[⛤] I think I'm getting that from Deutsch's Fabric of Reality ... but who knows at this point?

--
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

[gepr]

Aaaahhhh!! That SteveG conflated me and Marcus scares the hell out of me! Now I know I need to change my ways ... or re-load this bot.

On 4/5/21 12:07 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> That was Glen.   (My explanation is just that we have limited short term memory and can’t tolerate any other representation than terribly compressed forms.   So it is hard to gain confidence in simulations because we can’t get them entirely in our heads, nor prove them correct, nor reason very effectively about how mutations will change their behavior.   The natural world has no such hesitation.)

--
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

[Steve Smith]

Marcus  wrote:

That was Glen.   (My explanation is just that we have limited short term memory and can’t tolerate any other representation than terribly compressed forms.   So it is hard to gain confidence in simulations because we can’t get them entirely in our heads, nor prove them correct, nor reason very effectively about how mutations will change their behavior.   The natural world has no such hesitation.)

<not-snark> I wonder if perhaps that "the natural world" *does* have such hesitation in the sense you cop to here...  and suggest that when this happens it is exactly what we call "life".   We fat-brained humans with elaborate language are just the (known) apex of this process that bootstraps itself up some kind of tower-of-babel style complexity (to increase our ability to hold more and more and more qualitatively and quantitatively "in our heads").   Clay tablets unto nanodots (and beyond)  and proto-abacii unto quantum computers (and beyond) represent our progress toward extending our phenotypes represent our attempts to expand (transcend?) the reasons for our hesitation.  

Is "life itself" and "consciousness" by extension, somehow the urge (an inevitable self-organizing trend itself?) toward a particular type of self-organization?

</not snark>

- Steve

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

[Stephen Guerin-5]

My first evening (1998?)  in Santa Fe was Marcus to my left and you to my right at Second Street and then the visit to SFI discussing web-based SWARM. You two are forever dual homunculi of the same creature in my mind :-)

On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 1:18 PM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <[hidden email]> wrote:

Aaaahhhh!! That SteveG conflated me and Marcus scares the hell out of me! Now I know I need to change my ways ... or re-load this bot.

On 4/5/21 12:07 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> That was Glen.   (My explanation is just that we have limited short term memory and can’t tolerate any other representation than terribly compressed forms.   So it is hard to gain confidence in simulations because we can’t get them entirely in our heads, nor prove them correct, nor reason very effectively about how mutations will change their behavior.   The natural world has no such hesitation.)

--
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Humans might be capable of deciding how to allocate energy.  Or we might just infest the solar system and beyond, paving over everything.    With a HPC/complexity mindset, I tend to prefer big and direct approaches, myself.   I would be happy to drive around 1000hp electric hummer.   More motive to get fusion working!

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 12:31 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation

 

Marcus  wrote:

That was Glen.   (My explanation is just that we have limited short term memory and can’t tolerate any other representation than terribly compressed forms.   So it is hard to gain confidence in simulations because we can’t get them entirely in our heads, nor prove them correct, nor reason very effectively about how mutations will change their behavior.   The natural world has no such hesitation.)

<not-snark> I wonder if perhaps that "the natural world" *does* have such hesitation in the sense you cop to here...  and suggest that when this happens it is exactly what we call "life".   We fat-brained humans with elaborate language are just the (known) apex of this process that bootstraps itself up some kind of tower-of-babel style complexity (to increase our ability to hold more and more and more qualitatively and quantitatively "in our heads").   Clay tablets unto nanodots (and beyond)  and proto-abacii unto quantum computers (and beyond) represent our progress toward extending our phenotypes represent our attempts to expand (transcend?) the reasons for our hesitation.  

Is "life itself" and "consciousness" by extension, somehow the urge (an inevitable self-organizing trend itself?) toward a particular type of self-organization?

</not snark>

- Steve

 

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

[Frank Wimberly-2]

Not proof but:

Reynolds, W. N., Wimberly, F. C.

Simulation validation using Causal Inference Theory with morphological constraints

• November 2011
• Proceedings - Winter Simulation Conference

On Mon, Apr 5, 2021, 1:07 PM Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

That was Glen.   (My explanation is just that we have limited short term memory and can’t tolerate any other representation than terribly compressed forms.   So it is hard to gain confidence in simulations because we can’t get them entirely in our heads, nor prove them correct, nor reason very effectively about how mutations will change their behavior.   The natural world has no such hesitation.)

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Stephen Guerin
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 11:57 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation

 

 

Marcus writes:

Why "equation"? What is this obsession with equality or equivalence or even similarity/symmetry? OK. I get it, equations help us ask questions like "How does this thing over here transmogrify into that thing over there?" And if you have a bunch of terms in the equation, you can "solve" for this thing or that thing as a function of those other things.

I agree with your questioning, Marcus. Personally, if there is a unified theory, I think it will come in the form of an algorithm and not equation. In the same way natural selection is more of an algorithm than an equation. Of course, my personal Quixotic ranting on Dual Field Theory / Bi-Directional Path Tracing is of the algorithmic type. :-)

 

David Krakauer speaks eloquently about if there is ever a Unified Theory in complexity will probably be in the form of a computer program (algorithmic).
  https://youtu.be/0lDryEt80-g?t=108
  I linked to that point in the 1-hour talk, but highly recommend Friam folk listen to the whole bit as David hits on a lot of points raised on the list. 

Brian Arthur makes a similar point of the gradual transition of representation in Science from equations to computationa/algorithmic and points out that science took 500 years to transition from representing numbers in Roman numerals to Arabic numerals. He sees the transition to computational representations to take maybe 50 years (we're probably 30-years into it).

-S
_____________________________________________________________________

[hidden email]

CEO, Simtable  http://www.simtable.com

1600 Lena St #D1, Santa Fe, NM 87505

office: [phone] mobile: [phone]

twitter: @simtable

zoom.simtable.com

 

 

On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 12:09 PM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <[hidden email]> wrote:

https://bookshop.org/books/the-god-equation-the-quest-for-a-theory-of-everything-9780593396445/9780385542746

I'm tempted to buy this book. I doubt I will. But one of the sentences in the blurb triggered me:

"This would be the crowning achievement of science, a profound merging of all the forces of nature into one beautiful, magnificent equation to unlock the deepest mysteries in science: ..."

Why "equation"? What is this obsession with equality or equivalence or even similarity/symmetry? OK. I get it, equations help us ask questions like "How does this thing over here transmogrify into that thing over there?" And if you have a bunch of terms in the equation, you can "solve" for this thing or that thing as a function of those other things.

But why should any 1 thing from an N-tuple of things necessarily be representable in terms of the remaining N-1 things? Where does that urge come from? It sounds like a need for cognitive closure [⛧]. It dovetails nicely with the free will thread where everyone's convinced of their own brain farts and fond of giving authoritarian answers even though the emperor's nude.

The interview that sent me to Kaku's book is here: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/03/string-theory-michio-kaku-aliens-god-equation-large-hadron-collider
wherein he suggests the Multiverse can help harmonize religious beliefs! I'm tempted into pseudoscience nonsense to think that a feeling of free will (and the more collective "adjacent possible") is not justified by some meso-scopic biological evolutionary purpose, but because it's possible to see the "shadows" of other universes [⛤]. 8^D


[⛧] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1997-06343-011
[⛤] I think I'm getting that from Deutsch's Fabric of Reality ... but who knows at this point?

--
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

[Jochen Fromm-5]

Was Owen D. there too? He is so quiet recently.

I hope you are all OK? My father-in-law finally got the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine last week, no bigger side effects. He is already 80. Are you all vaccinated in Santa Fe too?

-J.

-------- Original message --------

From: Stephen Guerin <[hidden email]>

Date: 4/5/21 21:39 (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation

My first evening (1998?)  in Santa Fe was Marcus to my left and you to my right at Second Street and then the visit to SFI discussing web-based SWARM. You two are forever dual homunculi of the same creature in my mind :-)

On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 1:18 PM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <[hidden email]> wrote:

Aaaahhhh!! That SteveG conflated me and Marcus scares the hell out of me! Now I know I need to change my ways ... or re-load this bot.

On 4/5/21 12:07 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> That was Glen.   (My explanation is just that we have limited short term memory and can’t tolerate any other representation than terribly compressed forms.   So it is hard to gain confidence in simulations because we can’t get them entirely in our heads, nor prove them correct, nor reason very effectively about how mutations will change their behavior.   The natural world has no such hesitation.)

--
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

[Steve Smith]

Marcus wrote:

Humans might be capable of deciding how to allocate energy.  Or we might just infest the solar system and beyond, paving over everything.    With a HPC/complexity mindset, I tend to prefer big and direct approaches, myself.   I would be happy to drive around 1000hp electric hummer.   More motive to get fusion working!

I too have always been mildly attracted to Big Iron (why I came to LANL to work on the Proton Storage Ring and then on the (Super)Computing Division that became HPC), but in the bottom line I have always chosen my motorcycles (for example) to be ones I could stand back up if they fell over. 

Regarding a 1000hp Hummer:   My 4000lb Volt already seems excessive (to me) for most purposes, but I am in the market for hub-drive motor or two I can swap in under wheels of my 1949 Ford Dump Truck (more big iron) and run with the (salvaged out) battery from my Volt (16KWh of Lithium mined from Columbia after Musk stated "we can coup anyone we want").  Maybe graphene or nanopartical solid-state batteries or hydrogen fuel-cell technology will overtake Lithium Chemistry fast enough to make a 1000hp GWh Hummer less egregious than my Volt or the Gen1 Insight I tooled around in before that one.  

Re: Fusion energy plant proliferation:   There is one HUGE fusion reactor in the sky flooding us with a wide spectrum of radiation (albeit shielded nicely with an endogenous magnetic field and an atmosphere suffused with water vapor) which is fairly easy to harness for *heat* and even the ever-fungible stored electric charge...  

A half-dozen (salvaged) PV panels are enough to fill up my Volt's puny battery in a day of good sunshine...   your Hummer is not going to get the same range (30-40 miles) from the same KWh input (by half?).   In the 1970s, a mega-giga-hyper solar project in the AZ desert placed thousands of mirrors in concentric circles with heliostatic controls to focus on a central heating tower (steam generator?)...  *free energy!* everyone screamed hysterically... but it had to shut down in just a few years (as I remember it) because heat isn't the quantity needed to generate power, but rather heat-flow, so they were dumping scads of low-grade heat into the nearby Colorado River (why they chose the location I believe, for the cooling) to facilitate the power-generation...   eventually they were shown to be destroying (disrupting badly?) the existing ecosystem in the river and even Baja CA with all this "low grade" and "waste" heat.    Thermal fusion power plants are not going to do any more-better on this count I don't expect.  

Maybe direct electric-generation through fusion processes might get around that problem.  More tech is always the most obvious answer to the failings/exacerbations of the last round of tech.  Maybe Iron-Man class of miniaturization? 

                    Deliberately misquoting Pogo - "I have met the enemy and they is the Red Queen"

 

From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 12:31 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation

 

Marcus  wrote:

That was Glen.   (My explanation is just that we have limited short term memory and can’t tolerate any other representation than terribly compressed forms.   So it is hard to gain confidence in simulations because we can’t get them entirely in our heads, nor prove them correct, nor reason very effectively about how mutations will change their behavior.   The natural world has no such hesitation.)

<not-snark> I wonder if perhaps that "the natural world" *does* have such hesitation in the sense you cop to here...  and suggest that when this happens it is exactly what we call "life".   We fat-brained humans with elaborate language are just the (known) apex of this process that bootstraps itself up some kind of tower-of-babel style complexity (to increase our ability to hold more and more and more qualitatively and quantitatively "in our heads").   Clay tablets unto nanodots (and beyond)  and proto-abacii unto quantum computers (and beyond) represent our progress toward extending our phenotypes represent our attempts to expand (transcend?) the reasons for our hesitation.  

Is "life itself" and "consciousness" by extension, somehow the urge (an inevitable self-organizing trend itself?) toward a particular type of self-organization?

</not snark>

- Steve

 

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

[Marcus G. Daniels]

I have just a small Hybrid CMax now that gets about 45mph instead of my old Hybrid Escape that got about 30mph.   But the next will be all electric!

 

P.S. QuantumScape is an interesting battery company.  They’ve gone public but they have no product yet!    

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 2:29 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation

 

 

Marcus wrote:

Humans might be capable of deciding how to allocate energy.  Or we might just infest the solar system and beyond, paving over everything.    With a HPC/complexity mindset, I tend to prefer big and direct approaches, myself.   I would be happy to drive around 1000hp electric hummer.   More motive to get fusion working!

I too have always been mildly attracted to Big Iron (why I came to LANL to work on the Proton Storage Ring and then on the (Super)Computing Division that became HPC), but in the bottom line I have always chosen my motorcycles (for example) to be ones I could stand back up if they fell over. 

Regarding a 1000hp Hummer:   My 4000lb Volt already seems excessive (to me) for most purposes, but I am in the market for hub-drive motor or two I can swap in under wheels of my 1949 Ford Dump Truck (more big iron) and run with the (salvaged out) battery from my Volt (16KWh of Lithium mined from Columbia after Musk stated "we can coup anyone we want").  Maybe graphene or nanopartical solid-state batteries or hydrogen fuel-cell technology will overtake Lithium Chemistry fast enough to make a 1000hp GWh Hummer less egregious than my Volt or the Gen1 Insight I tooled around in before that one.  

Re: Fusion energy plant proliferation:   There is one HUGE fusion reactor in the sky flooding us with a wide spectrum of radiation (albeit shielded nicely with an endogenous magnetic field and an atmosphere suffused with water vapor) which is fairly easy to harness for *heat* and even the ever-fungible stored electric charge...  

A half-dozen (salvaged) PV panels are enough to fill up my Volt's puny battery in a day of good sunshine...   your Hummer is not going to get the same range (30-40 miles) from the same KWh input (by half?).   In the 1970s, a mega-giga-hyper solar project in the AZ desert placed thousands of mirrors in concentric circles with heliostatic controls to focus on a central heating tower (steam generator?)...  *free energy!* everyone screamed hysterically... but it had to shut down in just a few years (as I remember it) because heat isn't the quantity needed to generate power, but rather heat-flow, so they were dumping scads of low-grade heat into the nearby Colorado River (why they chose the location I believe, for the cooling) to facilitate the power-generation...   eventually they were shown to be destroying (disrupting badly?) the existing ecosystem in the river and even Baja CA with all this "low grade" and "waste" heat.    Thermal fusion power plants are not going to do any more-better on this count I don't expect.  

Maybe direct electric-generation through fusion processes might get around that problem.  More tech is always the most obvious answer to the failings/exacerbations of the last round of tech.  Maybe Iron-Man class of miniaturization? 

                    Deliberately misquoting Pogo - "I have met the enemy and they is the Red Queen"

 

From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 12:31 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation

 

Marcus  wrote:

That was Glen.   (My explanation is just that we have limited short term memory and can’t tolerate any other representation than terribly compressed forms.   So it is hard to gain confidence in simulations because we can’t get them entirely in our heads, nor prove them correct, nor reason very effectively about how mutations will change their behavior.   The natural world has no such hesitation.)

<not-snark> I wonder if perhaps that "the natural world" *does* have such hesitation in the sense you cop to here...  and suggest that when this happens it is exactly what we call "life".   We fat-brained humans with elaborate language are just the (known) apex of this process that bootstraps itself up some kind of tower-of-babel style complexity (to increase our ability to hold more and more and more qualitatively and quantitatively "in our heads").   Clay tablets unto nanodots (and beyond)  and proto-abacii unto quantum computers (and beyond) represent our progress toward extending our phenotypes represent our attempts to expand (transcend?) the reasons for our hesitation.  

Is "life itself" and "consciousness" by extension, somehow the urge (an inevitable self-organizing trend itself?) toward a particular type of self-organization?

</not snark>

- Steve

 

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam

un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/

archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

[gepr]

I was recently tempted  by this:

https://www.northwestmoto.com/inventory/v1/Current/Zero/Dualsport-Bikes/2021-DSRBF/ZF144--Seattle-Washington---15819381

On 4/5/21 3:32 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> I have just a small Hybrid CMax now that gets about 45mph instead of my old Hybrid Escape that got about 30mph.   But the next will be all electric!


--
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Probably enough for zipping around town.    I'm afraid of motorcycles, so maybe https://www.arcimoto.com/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 3:37 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation

I was recently tempted  by this:

https://www.northwestmoto.com/inventory/v1/Current/Zero/Dualsport-Bikes/2021-DSRBF/ZF144--Seattle-Washington---15819381

On 4/5/21 3:32 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> I have just a small Hybrid CMax now that gets about 45mph instead of my old Hybrid Escape that got about 30mph.   But the next will be all electric!


--
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

[Steve Smith]

Marcus wrote:

I have just a small Hybrid CMax now that gets about 45mph instead of my old Hybrid Escape that got about 30mph.   But the next will be all electric!

 

P.S. QuantumScape is an interesting battery company.  They’ve gone public but they have no product yet!   

The pace of the market is only a little slower than the pace of tech which is only a little behind the pace of science.   It feels like some kind of singularity is an epsilon away. (but what is that epsilon? )  

- Steve

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

[Steve Smith]

uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ -

I've been watching for an "affordable" early generation Zero for some
time... unfortunately the tech evolves so fast by the time I call one
"affordable" the specs (mostly range) looks really lame to me (100 miles
is the new 40).  

A few years ago I slapped a $200 hub motor on my 30 year old mountain
bike with a half-dozen NiMH DCell Sticks (salvaged from my Insight)
strapped up like a bundle of dynamite on the back rack).  It gives me
just enough boost/range that my old-man
legs/hips/belly/lungs/heart/glutes can perform  vaguely like they did a
decade or two ago but what I'm really holding out for is some
seven-league-boot class prosthetics.

- Steve
> I was recently tempted  by this:
>
> https://www.northwestmoto.com/inventory/v1/Current/Zero/Dualsport-Bikes/2021-DSRBF/ZF144--Seattle-Washington---15819381
>
> On 4/5/21 3:32 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> I have just a small Hybrid CMax now that gets about 45mph instead of my old Hybrid Escape that got about 30mph.   But the next will be all electric!
>










- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

[Jochen Fromm-5]

We have leased a new BMW 330e "plugin hybrid" now which will replace our old BMW 1 series at the end of the month. There are not enough charging stations at the moment for a pure electric car like the BMW i3.

-J.

-------- Original message --------

From: Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]>

Date: 4/6/21 00:33 (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation

I have just a small Hybrid CMax now that gets about 45mph instead of my old Hybrid Escape that got about 30mph.   But the next will be all electric!

 

P.S. QuantumScape is an interesting battery company.  They’ve gone public but they have no product yet!    

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 2:29 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation

 

 

Marcus wrote:

Humans might be capable of deciding how to allocate energy.  Or we might just infest the solar system and beyond, paving over everything.    With a HPC/complexity mindset, I tend to prefer big and direct approaches, myself.   I would be happy to drive around 1000hp electric hummer.   More motive to get fusion working!

I too have always been mildly attracted to Big Iron (why I came to LANL to work on the Proton Storage Ring and then on the (Super)Computing Division that became HPC), but in the bottom line I have always chosen my motorcycles (for example) to be ones I could stand back up if they fell over. 

Regarding a 1000hp Hummer:   My 4000lb Volt already seems excessive (to me) for most purposes, but I am in the market for hub-drive motor or two I can swap in under wheels of my 1949 Ford Dump Truck (more big iron) and run with the (salvaged out) battery from my Volt (16KWh of Lithium mined from Columbia after Musk stated "we can coup anyone we want").  Maybe graphene or nanopartical solid-state batteries or hydrogen fuel-cell technology will overtake Lithium Chemistry fast enough to make a 1000hp GWh Hummer less egregious than my Volt or the Gen1 Insight I tooled around in before that one.  

Re: Fusion energy plant proliferation:   There is one HUGE fusion reactor in the sky flooding us with a wide spectrum of radiation (albeit shielded nicely with an endogenous magnetic field and an atmosphere suffused with water vapor) which is fairly easy to harness for *heat* and even the ever-fungible stored electric charge...  

A half-dozen (salvaged) PV panels are enough to fill up my Volt's puny battery in a day of good sunshine...   your Hummer is not going to get the same range (30-40 miles) from the same KWh input (by half?).   In the 1970s, a mega-giga-hyper solar project in the AZ desert placed thousands of mirrors in concentric circles with heliostatic controls to focus on a central heating tower (steam generator?)...  *free energy!* everyone screamed hysterically... but it had to shut down in just a few years (as I remember it) because heat isn't the quantity needed to generate power, but rather heat-flow, so they were dumping scads of low-grade heat into the nearby Colorado River (why they chose the location I believe, for the cooling) to facilitate the power-generation...   eventually they were shown to be destroying (disrupting badly?) the existing ecosystem in the river and even Baja CA with all this "low grade" and "waste" heat.    Thermal fusion power plants are not going to do any more-better on this count I don't expect.  

Maybe direct electric-generation through fusion processes might get around that problem.  More tech is always the most obvious answer to the failings/exacerbations of the last round of tech.  Maybe Iron-Man class of miniaturization? 

                    Deliberately misquoting Pogo - "I have met the enemy and they is the Red Queen"

 

From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 12:31 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation

 

Marcus  wrote:

That was Glen.   (My explanation is just that we have limited short term memory and can’t tolerate any other representation than terribly compressed forms.   So it is hard to gain confidence in simulations because we can’t get them entirely in our heads, nor prove them correct, nor reason very effectively about how mutations will change their behavior.   The natural world has no such hesitation.)

<not-snark> I wonder if perhaps that "the natural world" *does* have such hesitation in the sense you cop to here...  and suggest that when this happens it is exactly what we call "life".   We fat-brained humans with elaborate language are just the (known) apex of this process that bootstraps itself up some kind of tower-of-babel style complexity (to increase our ability to hold more and more and more qualitatively and quantitatively "in our heads").   Clay tablets unto nanodots (and beyond)  and proto-abacii unto quantum computers (and beyond) represent our progress toward extending our phenotypes represent our attempts to expand (transcend?) the reasons for our hesitation.  

Is "life itself" and "consciousness" by extension, somehow the urge (an inevitable self-organizing trend itself?) toward a particular type of self-organization?

</not snark>

- Steve

 

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam

un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/

archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Some households (like when I was bitcoin mining!) couldn’t allocate another 60 amps to a charging circuit.   Or because of on-demand electric hot water, baseboard heating, etc.

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Jochen Fromm
Sent: Tuesday, April 6, 2021 2:16 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Hybrid cars

 

We have leased a new BMW 330e "plugin hybrid" now which will replace our old BMW 1 series at the end of the month. There are not enough charging stations at the moment for a pure electric car like the BMW i3.

 

-J.

 

 

-------- Original message --------

From: Marcus Daniels <[hidden email]>

Date: 4/6/21 00:33 (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation

 

I have just a small Hybrid CMax now that gets about 45mph instead of my old Hybrid Escape that got about 30mph.   But the next will be all electric!

 

P.S. QuantumScape is an interesting battery company.  They’ve gone public but they have no product yet!    

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 2:29 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation

 

 

Marcus wrote:

Humans might be capable of deciding how to allocate energy.  Or we might just infest the solar system and beyond, paving over everything.    With a HPC/complexity mindset, I tend to prefer big and direct approaches, myself.   I would be happy to drive around 1000hp electric hummer.   More motive to get fusion working!

I too have always been mildly attracted to Big Iron (why I came to LANL to work on the Proton Storage Ring and then on the (Super)Computing Division that became HPC), but in the bottom line I have always chosen my motorcycles (for example) to be ones I could stand back up if they fell over. 

Regarding a 1000hp Hummer:   My 4000lb Volt already seems excessive (to me) for most purposes, but I am in the market for hub-drive motor or two I can swap in under wheels of my 1949 Ford Dump Truck (more big iron) and run with the (salvaged out) battery from my Volt (16KWh of Lithium mined from Columbia after Musk stated "we can coup anyone we want").  Maybe graphene or nanopartical solid-state batteries or hydrogen fuel-cell technology will overtake Lithium Chemistry fast enough to make a 1000hp GWh Hummer less egregious than my Volt or the Gen1 Insight I tooled around in before that one.  

Re: Fusion energy plant proliferation:   There is one HUGE fusion reactor in the sky flooding us with a wide spectrum of radiation (albeit shielded nicely with an endogenous magnetic field and an atmosphere suffused with water vapor) which is fairly easy to harness for *heat* and even the ever-fungible stored electric charge...  

A half-dozen (salvaged) PV panels are enough to fill up my Volt's puny battery in a day of good sunshine...   your Hummer is not going to get the same range (30-40 miles) from the same KWh input (by half?).   In the 1970s, a mega-giga-hyper solar project in the AZ desert placed thousands of mirrors in concentric circles with heliostatic controls to focus on a central heating tower (steam generator?)...  *free energy!* everyone screamed hysterically... but it had to shut down in just a few years (as I remember it) because heat isn't the quantity needed to generate power, but rather heat-flow, so they were dumping scads of low-grade heat into the nearby Colorado River (why they chose the location I believe, for the cooling) to facilitate the power-generation...   eventually they were shown to be destroying (disrupting badly?) the existing ecosystem in the river and even Baja CA with all this "low grade" and "waste" heat.    Thermal fusion power plants are not going to do any more-better on this count I don't expect.  

Maybe direct electric-generation through fusion processes might get around that problem.  More tech is always the most obvious answer to the failings/exacerbations of the last round of tech.  Maybe Iron-Man class of miniaturization? 

                    Deliberately misquoting Pogo - "I have met the enemy and they is the Red Queen"

 

From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 12:31 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation

 

Marcus  wrote:

That was Glen.   (My explanation is just that we have limited short term memory and can’t tolerate any other representation than terribly compressed forms.   So it is hard to gain confidence in simulations because we can’t get them entirely in our heads, nor prove them correct, nor reason very effectively about how mutations will change their behavior.   The natural world has no such hesitation.)

<not-snark> I wonder if perhaps that "the natural world" *does* have such hesitation in the sense you cop to here...  and suggest that when this happens it is exactly what we call "life".   We fat-brained humans with elaborate language are just the (known) apex of this process that bootstraps itself up some kind of tower-of-babel style complexity (to increase our ability to hold more and more and more qualitatively and quantitatively "in our heads").   Clay tablets unto nanodots (and beyond)  and proto-abacii unto quantum computers (and beyond) represent our progress toward extending our phenotypes represent our attempts to expand (transcend?) the reasons for our hesitation.  

Is "life itself" and "consciousness" by extension, somehow the urge (an inevitable self-organizing trend itself?) toward a particular type of self-organization?

</not snark>

- Steve

 

 

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam

un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/

archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

[gepr]

Very cool! Tempus Dictum started developing an electric motorcycle back in, I think, 2011. One of our employees hollowed out and reshaped the frame of an old Kawasaki. But we never found a good fit for the motor. And then the main guy got distracted by work that actually generated revenue. So the project died. Pfft. Stupid capitalism.

On 4/5/21 7:02 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> A few years ago I slapped a $200 hub motor on my 30 year old mountain
> bike with a half-dozen NiMH DCell Sticks (salvaged from my Insight)
> strapped up like a bundle of dynamite on the back rack).  It gives me
> just enough boost/range that my old-man
> legs/hips/belly/lungs/heart/glutes can perform  vaguely like they did a
> decade or two ago but what I'm really holding out for is some
> seven-league-boot class prosthetics.


--
↙↙↙ uǝlƃ

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

[Steve Smith]

Jochen & Other EV/Hybrid enthusiasts-

Do you know where you electricity comes from? 

When I got my Volt (Ampera to you) I had to acknowledge to my purist friends that I was driving a "coal fired" vehicle (since my Electric Coop is still mostly coal-fired).   Of course, free (or not always so free) markets are driving them to phase out the major coal plant in the 4 Corners area (where I apparently export *my* fossil fuel pollution and cause the extraction of so much groundwater  to sluice the coal from mine to plant that the land is literally settling).   I shook my tiny fist at my Cooperative only to find that they were constrained by a Public Regulatory Commission form building and operating their own renewable sources (yup, we have a lot of sun and wind) until 2025.  MegaCorp regional electricity corp has a monopoly on providing them (and me) power through that date.  

I had the option of buying salvage panels (originally from Germany!) at $.10/watt ($30 for $300W) which is a *fraction* of the new cost of such things, and at least doesn't drive the extractive market, although it *does* relieve the burden on the primary industry for handling a gigantic waste stream (for operations and maintenance efficiency it seems commercial installations of PV has a refresh cycle closer to 10 years rather than the 20+ quoted to home users)).

- Steve

On 4/6/21 3:16 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:

We have leased a new BMW 330e "plugin hybrid" now which will replace our old BMW 1 series at the end of the month. There are not enough charging stations at the moment for a pure electric car like the BMW i3.

-J.

-------- Original message --------

From: Marcus Daniels [hidden email]

Date: 4/6/21 00:33 (GMT+01:00)

To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation

I have just a small Hybrid CMax now that gets about 45mph instead of my old Hybrid Escape that got about 30mph.   But the next will be all electric!

 

P.S. QuantumScape is an interesting battery company.  They’ve gone public but they have no product yet!    

 

From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 2:29 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation

 

 

Marcus wrote:

Humans might be capable of deciding how to allocate energy.  Or we might just infest the solar system and beyond, paving over everything.    With a HPC/complexity mindset, I tend to prefer big and direct approaches, myself.   I would be happy to drive around 1000hp electric hummer.   More motive to get fusion working!

I too have always been mildly attracted to Big Iron (why I came to LANL to work on the Proton Storage Ring and then on the (Super)Computing Division that became HPC), but in the bottom line I have always chosen my motorcycles (for example) to be ones I could stand back up if they fell over. 

Regarding a 1000hp Hummer:   My 4000lb Volt already seems excessive (to me) for most purposes, but I am in the market for hub-drive motor or two I can swap in under wheels of my 1949 Ford Dump Truck (more big iron) and run with the (salvaged out) battery from my Volt (16KWh of Lithium mined from Columbia after Musk stated "we can coup anyone we want").  Maybe graphene or nanopartical solid-state batteries or hydrogen fuel-cell technology will overtake Lithium Chemistry fast enough to make a 1000hp GWh Hummer less egregious than my Volt or the Gen1 Insight I tooled around in before that one.  

Re: Fusion energy plant proliferation:   There is one HUGE fusion reactor in the sky flooding us with a wide spectrum of radiation (albeit shielded nicely with an endogenous magnetic field and an atmosphere suffused with water vapor) which is fairly easy to harness for *heat* and even the ever-fungible stored electric charge...  

A half-dozen (salvaged) PV panels are enough to fill up my Volt's puny battery in a day of good sunshine...   your Hummer is not going to get the same range (30-40 miles) from the same KWh input (by half?).   In the 1970s, a mega-giga-hyper solar project in the AZ desert placed thousands of mirrors in concentric circles with heliostatic controls to focus on a central heating tower (steam generator?)...  *free energy!* everyone screamed hysterically... but it had to shut down in just a few years (as I remember it) because heat isn't the quantity needed to generate power, but rather heat-flow, so they were dumping scads of low-grade heat into the nearby Colorado River (why they chose the location I believe, for the cooling) to facilitate the power-generation...   eventually they were shown to be destroying (disrupting badly?) the existing ecosystem in the river and even Baja CA with all this "low grade" and "waste" heat.    Thermal fusion power plants are not going to do any more-better on this count I don't expect.  

Maybe direct electric-generation through fusion processes might get around that problem.  More tech is always the most obvious answer to the failings/exacerbations of the last round of tech.  Maybe Iron-Man class of miniaturization? 

                    Deliberately misquoting Pogo - "I have met the enemy and they is the Red Queen"

 

From: Friam [hidden email] On Behalf Of Steve Smith
Sent: Monday, April 5, 2021 12:31 PM
To: [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The God Equation

 

Marcus  wrote:

That was Glen.   (My explanation is just that we have limited short term memory and can’t tolerate any other representation than terribly compressed forms.   So it is hard to gain confidence in simulations because we can’t get them entirely in our heads, nor prove them correct, nor reason very effectively about how mutations will change their behavior.   The natural world has no such hesitation.)

<not-snark> I wonder if perhaps that "the natural world" *does* have such hesitation in the sense you cop to here...  and suggest that when this happens it is exactly what we call "life".   We fat-brained humans with elaborate language are just the (known) apex of this process that bootstraps itself up some kind of tower-of-babel style complexity (to increase our ability to hold more and more and more qualitatively and quantitatively "in our heads").   Clay tablets unto nanodots (and beyond)  and proto-abacii unto quantum computers (and beyond) represent our progress toward extending our phenotypes represent our attempts to expand (transcend?) the reasons for our hesitation.  

Is "life itself" and "consciousness" by extension, somehow the urge (an inevitable self-organizing trend itself?) toward a particular type of self-organization?

</not snark>

- Steve

 

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv

Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam

un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/

archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/

- .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/