[HN Gopher] It's an age of marvels
___________________________________________________________________
It's an age of marvels
Author : pavel_lishin
Score : 287 points
Date : 2024-05-13 11:49 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.plover.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.plover.com)
| pfdietz wrote:
| I believe GPS also uses multiple wavelengths to allow estimation
| of signal delay from passage through the ionosphere.
|
| The way Martian meteorites are identified is from isotopes of
| inert gases (neon, argon, for example). Mars has a particular
| pattern of these that's been measured by landers there.
| Meteorites from the moon are identified by oxygen isotopes, which
| are on the same line on the oxygen isotope plot as Earth rocks
| (this is also a strong clue about the origin of the moon.)
| changoplatanero wrote:
| The gps thing is even more amazing that what he said in the
| article because it turns out that the receiver doesn't need an
| accurate clock of its own for it to work
| perlgeek wrote:
| That's right, you get rid of the requirement of its own
| clock, and instead accept that you need to "see" one more
| satellite than you'd need otherwise.
|
| The (oversimplified) mental model is this:
|
| If the receiver knows the exact time, and sees a signal from
| one satellite, it knows its position in one spatial
| dimension.
|
| For each satellite signal you add, you can determine the
| position in one more dimension. Once you get to the 3rd
| satellite, you have no more dimensions to add. Instead, the
| 4th satellite lets you drop the requirement for your own
| (absolute) time keeping.
|
| After that, each satellite you see improves the overall
| precision.
| pfdietz wrote:
| If the receiver has some internal sensors that can also
| help (gyros of various kinds).
|
| I remember as a kid my father was working on the first
| version of the Air Combat Maneuvering Range (this was back
| in the late 1960s.) This involved dogfights with simulated
| missiles and guns. To work, the system needed to accurately
| track the position of the aircraft. Radars on mountains
| around the range would give good positions in two
| dimensions, but poor vertical position (this axis was
| nearly perpendicular to the line from a radar to a plane).
| The solution was to add a pod to each aircraft with various
| gyros and incorporate this information via a Kalman filter.
| Nowadays such a system would just use GPS, much simpler.
| throwup238 wrote:
| On top of that, with modern surveying and an RTK GPS base
| station you can get centimeter accuracy for very precise
| measurements of land, all by carrying a stick with a receiver
| on it. Most populated counties in the US already have a
| network running so you usually just need the receiver.
| blacksqr wrote:
| Medicine is magical and magical is art Think of the boy in the
| bubble And the baby with the baboon heart
|
| And I believe These are the days of lasers in the jungle Lasers
| in the jungle somewhere Staccato signals of constant information
| A loose affiliation of millionaires And billionaires and baby
|
| These are the days of miracle and wonder
| goodgoblin wrote:
| I also appreciate the marvelous rhythm of the modern world,
| more miracles per square foot than the life of any saint.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| Yeah that's sure to blow past peoples' minds: how _many_ of
| those marvels there are all around us.
|
| Few everyday objects that did _NOT_ result from a
| production+logistics chain 100s of nodes long.
| ks2048 wrote:
| Hate to be a downer, but the bomb in the baby carriage is wired
| through the radio.
| AStrangeMorrow wrote:
| I am just glad to see I am not the only one making up imaginary
| scenario where I bring people from the past to have them marvel
| at our world.
| tetris11 wrote:
| I do this with music, and measure how good a song is by what
| fraction _f_ of the words I would need to change for me to send
| it _n_ years back in time to be understood by an older
| audience.
|
| I have a small community (n=1 or 4?) where I write this up:
|
| https://lemmy.ml/c/howtimeless
| nicbou wrote:
| Which one would require the most explaining, according to
| you?
| scarby2 wrote:
| Not OP but it's likely some modern rap. A lot of the
| language used deviates significantly from what we would
| consider to be standard English and derives from cants that
| are not very old (80s/90s maybe).
| genewitch wrote:
| It's the end of the world - R.E.M.; One Week - Barenaked
| Ladies. That's just off the top(ical) of my head.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| My favorite "one of these" is the idea of taking a Raspberry
| Pi, or ATtiny, or modern Macbook Pro back to the ENIAC guys.
| Can you imagine how they'd have reacted to see these tiny
| little devices which pack orders of magnitude more
| computational power than their warehouse-sized computer? The
| mind boggles.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I tend to always play the cynic in these games. And I think
| one little way to easily do that is to reverse the roles with
| an example you are giving. So for your example, imagine
| somebody from the future came and showed you a pinhead sized
| device with countless exabytes of computational power
| projected onto a holographic screen. While I'm sure you'd be
| impressed and have plenty of questions, I don't think there
| would be any particular shock. Evolutionary progress - even
| at absurd scales, is still just evolutionary progress, and
| easily 'graspable'.
| gs17 wrote:
| Agreed, I think if you showed me as a kid that a tiny
| microSD could store every game I ever played and still have
| room for every TV show I ever watched without getting
| remotely full, and was affordable, it'd be impressive. But
| it wouldn't blow my mind as something inconceivable, I had
| already known floppy disks both shrunk in size and
| increased in capacity.
|
| Plus, I'd imagine "the ENIAC guys" would quickly realize
| all the things that were computationally infeasible in
| their time had more or less been done along the way to
| modern computers.
| throwaway11460 wrote:
| That's because you have witnessed the decades of
| exponential growth. It's not hard to extrapolate that
| growth further, albeit it still blows my own mind when I
| see a _disk_ that looks like a RAM, is way faster than my
| RAM was 15 years ago (2 GB /s? You must've forgotten to
| take your crazy pills), and has 2000 times more storage.
|
| But show it to a guy working with electromechanical or
| vacuum tube computers and I'm sure it would be a very
| otherworldly experience for them.
|
| I'm actually not sure what would blow their mind more - a
| very big and unimaginably fast computer, or a by today's
| standards very slow computer that fits on few millimeters.
| Things like payment cards or SIMs are just incredible too -
| enough compute power to land on the Moon hidden in a piece
| of plastic.
| ghaff wrote:
| Read SF of the era. You probably have some very far
| futures where the computers running everything are
| essentially invisible. But SF authors for the most part
| are not imaging miniaturized supercomputers woven into
| the fabric of everyday life.
| mhink wrote:
| I would agree if we were talking about, say, a team in
| 1970, but it's worth pointing out that we're talking about
| a team working during the very infancy of computer
| engineering (the late 40s/early 50s). Just off the top of
| my head, you had solid-state hardware, stored-program
| machines, and the Von Neumann architecture all just popping
| on to the scene. This is stuff that would definitely have
| been on their radar, but I think they'd be fascinated to
| realize how directly and fundamentally those inventions
| would affect computing.
|
| Perhaps more importantly, I think they would be blown away
| by how directly and fundamentally _computing_ would change
| _the world_. Doug Englebart and his team are the ones who
| really developed the idea of using computers for something
| other than performing calculations for scientists. They
| started that research in the early 60s, and didn 't drop
| the Mother Of All Demos until 1968. So if I were one of the
| "ENIAC guys", and someone asked me how my work would affect
| the world, I'd probably just shrug and suggest that the
| computers I was building would help perform computations
| that would let other scientists make discoveries more
| quickly.
| somenameforme wrote:
| 1950s was the era of Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Heinlein,
| etc. Give people a spark and we naturally will create a
| flame, even if only in our minds. Take something current
| - many people are already envisioning futures where LLMs
| will not only be running on basically every device, but
| also integrated into each and every aspect of life. Some
| even envision them eventually replacing humans in
| politics, working as caretakers, and more.
|
| It's easy to imagine it - even with absolutely no basis
| for it whatsoever. Go back millennia to the first men
| making ships able to embark deep into the oceans, and
| these people would also have already been envisioning the
| Titanic. The moment the Wright Bros proved flight viable,
| many were seeing the Hindenberg. It's just human nature.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Hedonic adaptation. See even the other threads about ChatGPT
| where people are complaining that it's still not good enough,
| even though nothing like it were possible a mere few years
| ago. People will adapt to anything over time, and so like the
| other commenter, I too would not be shocked to not see much
| shock on their faces if you showed them such a miniature
| computer.
| chasd00 wrote:
| me> in my pocket contains a device that gives me access to all
| of the world's information almost instantly
|
| person from the past> wow! what do you do with it?
|
| me> look at pictures of cats and argue with people i don't even
| know
|
| /i think that's from an xkcd
| pixl97 wrote:
| Benjamin Franklin: "So you're telling me there are hot single
| women in my area that are looking to date?"
| more_corn wrote:
| Xkcd having a joke for every occasion might be a true modern
| marvel.
| quectophoton wrote:
| My made-up imaginary scenarios are usually about scientists of
| the past that had to do everything by hand, and today's Desmos
| Graphing Calculator[1].
|
| [1]: https://www.desmos.com/calculator
| eleveriven wrote:
| It's fascinating to imagine how people from the past might
| react to the technological advancements and societal changes of
| the present day! I love to imagine my great grandpa exploring
| the world now.
| munchler wrote:
| I do when I'm driving to the airport in the DC area. I imagine
| that I'm actually picking up Abe Lincoln from the 1860's and
| what I'll show him on the drive back.
| ctenb wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240512232147/https://blog.plov...
| ertgbnm wrote:
| More than anything else, I think the modern American super market
| would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any
| other marvel that exists.
|
| You have blueberries for sale in January??? A variety box of tea
| from 7 different countries? A wall of spices? Pineapples?
| Packaging made from aluminum that is just thrown away? The bread
| isn't full of sand and grit? And it's sliced!!!
|
| All relatively affordable and accessible to the average person.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> I think the modern American super market would blow the
| minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any other marvel
| that exists_
|
| Mate, the 7-Eleven Big Gulp, the Walmart 5-gallon bucket of
| Snickers and the giant Costco bulk bag of peanut butter M&Ms
| blows my present day European mind, let alone someone from
| 1900.
| qlm wrote:
| The quantity of chocolate for sale in bulk certainly is
| surprising. Unfortunately I find American chocolate to be
| borderline inedible.
| le-mark wrote:
| Best not to think of it as "chocolate" similar to how
| cheese whiz is only loosely related to cheese.
| MisterTea wrote:
| You're thinking of the cheap stuff like Hershey and other
| candy bar crap. It's all sugar.
| kybernetikos wrote:
| I don't think it's just the sugar, Hershey uses butyric
| acid in its process and some other manufacturers copy
| them because that's the taste US consumers associate with
| chocolate. To people used to chocolate made without
| butyric acid, it tastes like vomit.
| pfdietz wrote:
| More accurately, Hershey is thought to use milk that is
| partially lipolyzed, and this process generates butyric
| acid -- which, according to the wikipedia page, is also
| found in Parmesan cheese. Does that taste like vomit?
|
| I find European chocolate tastes sickeningly sweet, so to
| each his own.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I promise we have good chocolate here, just stay away from
| anything labeled Hershey's or Cadbury because it's the malk
| equivalent of milk.
| criddell wrote:
| That's like saying you don't like American beer because you
| tried Bud Light, Coors Light, and Miller Lite and didn't
| like any of them.
|
| There are a _lot_ of great chocolate makers in the US.
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| > There are a lot of great chocolate makers in the US.
|
| Ghirardelli are decent, but I've been relatively hard-
| pressed to find decent American chocolatiers otherwise.
| In general, European chocolatiers are in a different
| league.
| ghaff wrote:
| You won't generally find the best in the supermarket--
| probably either in the US or Europe. There are actually
| some pretty good more artisanal chocolate bars you can
| get in many supermarkets to my tastes. But they're still
| by definition mass market and (often) not as good as what
| some specialty maker with a small store has.
| orwin wrote:
| And cheese too! but you will hardly find good cheesemaker
| at a piggy wiggly (or even in SF more reputable
| supermarkets). The best i had was one from Hungtinton's
| Farmer market (WV), easily a top4-top3 goat cheese.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| You only really see kids eating m&ms. There's good American
| chocolate too, american chefs can read and follow a recipe
| just fine.
| RGamma wrote:
| There's tasteful advancement of civilization. And then
| there's mountains of trash food.
| oblio wrote:
| Those are the ones that scared you?!?
|
| Walgreens/CSV literal buckets of medicine like Advil and
| whatnot were some of the scariest things I've seen, and worst
| of all, people DEFENDING them.
| pfdietz wrote:
| How old are you?
| supportengineer wrote:
| I'm curious why Advil is scary to you.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| It really is amazing, that's why we really need to appreciate
| and protect what we have. The incredible abundance we currently
| have is not the norm. It was not even 100 years ago that people
| were starving in the US during the great depression.
|
| Think about this every time someone promotes extremist violent
| rhetoric.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| But at what cost? How much should we sacrifice so that
| blueberries exist year round?
| boxed wrote:
| What is the cost we are paying that you imply is too high?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Shipping blueberries around the world can't be great for
| the environment.
| Retric wrote:
| Why not? Bulk shipping is really efficient, local farmers
| markets can easily be worse for the environment than
| going to a supermarket. A Semi moving 35 tons at 7 MPG is
| 25 times more fuel efficient vs a ford F-150 moving 1/2
| ton at 20 MPG and trains or boats are even better.
|
| In the end fuel costs money so more efficient logistics
| is often good for the environment. Buying local makes a
| lot more sense if you live in a farming community than a
| port city.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Replacing shipped blueberries with locally farmed ones
| definitely could be a wash or a loss, environmentally,
| for sure I agree there. But we have relatively efficient
| industrial scale farming in the US as well, if we
| admitted that blueberries are seasonal we could grow them
| in big efficient farms and then just ship them less far.
| ghaff wrote:
| A lot of fruits freeze pretty well too. When I'm in Maine
| at the right time of year and big boxes of "wild" local
| (low-bush) blueberries are for sale, often they're
| already frozen. I agree that local fruits during their
| short local season can be pretty good but stuff that's
| shipped in or frozen isn't necessarily bad. Depends on
| the produce.
| boxed wrote:
| For sure the cost of carbon and other pollution should be
| factored in. But I don't think the externalities are that
| large really. I would be surprised if the cost would go
| up more than 20% if we had a proper carbon tax in place.
| At least after the market adapts.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Yeah, a carbon tax is the way to go. I wouldn't be at all
| surprised if you are right that the externalities aren't
| huge on this one, but it would be good to take them into
| account regardless.
| tekla wrote:
| The externality of a locally grown blueberry is
| incredibly higher than industrial farmed blueberries
| genewitch wrote:
| lol, what? I have blueberry bushes in my yard, they were
| like $5. i put them in the ground and then ignored them
| for years. It is true that not every piece of land can do
| what i did here, but these sweeping "marvel at the
| advance of farming" ideas are silly to me. I had a peach,
| plum, orange, and fig tree in my back yard growing up in
| california. When we sold the house the new owners tore
| them down. I think that's sad. Fresh, free fruit every
| year?
|
| Now, growing enough of _one thing_ to be able to _sell_
| it to turn a profit might have "greater externality" but
| even that might not be true depending on the methods
| used. There are composting farms where people bring their
| refuse - specifically "anything that was alive recently"
| can go in the compost, and this will provide nutrients
| and soil amendments in a sustainable way to that farm,
| which can then provide nutrition to the community it
| serves.
|
| You can't feed the planet with a small, self-sustaining
| farm. But this idea that it's a net negative needs to
| DIAF.
| anonporridge wrote:
| There's no intrinsic reason why it can't be.
|
| It entirely depends on how many externalities are created
| as debt to the future in order to ship blueberries around
| the world. Internalize those externalities and the
| grinding force of the market will eventually eliminate or
| mitigate them.
|
| The future we should all be striving for is one of
| extreme abundance for everyone, not forcing everyone into
| hair shirts.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| > Shipping blueberries around the world can't be great
| for the environment.
|
| Look at the price to ship something.
|
| The cost of fuel burned can not be greater than the
| shipping cost, and it is probably much less.
| ks2048 wrote:
| People mention environmental costs. There are also
| geopolitical costs. I write this from Guatemala, where 70
| years ago, a budding 10-year-old democracy was destroyed
| so that Americans could continue to get cheap bananas.
| And the country never really recovered.
|
| Of course, from technology and "globalization", I think
| the abundance of American supermarkets would still have
| occurred, but this has been optimized at the expense of
| human rights and wages of people throughout the world.
| oblio wrote:
| > I write this from Guatemala, where 70 years ago, a
| budding 10-year-old democracy was destroyed so that
| Americans could continue to get cheap bananas. And the
| country never really recovered.
|
| Worse, they mocked it and still do with terms such as
| "banana republic". They haven't even learned any better.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| My problem with it is that not only are we paying the
| environmental cost to have berries all year round in the
| grocery store, it's that they're also just shit quality.
| Like not just passable, but are bitter and sour and not
| worth it at all. And it's sort of at the expense of really
| good, local berries when the real season hits. For example,
| I live in Brooklyn and the grocery stores last summer
| barely had any local blueberries from New Jersey.
| Everything was Driscolls branded berries, and they're
| always bad. They look like berries, but they taste awful,
| or at best like nothing, 95% of the time. I don't know much
| about the market, but I wouldn't be surprised if they had a
| year long contract and the local producers get shut out
| during the real season. Luckily there are farmers markets
| and CSAs near me.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| _This_ so much.
|
| People who live in Western cities have no fucking clue
| what fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste like.
|
| It's like a running gag that my father complains about
| supermarket tomatoes, but after travelling through rural
| places in Eastern and Southern Europe and a little bit in
| Central America, I totally get it.
| ghaff wrote:
| Tomatoes are probably about the worst example you could
| pick. Fresh tomatoes can be excellent (though I'm really
| not a tomato aficionado) during the short period when
| they're in season locally in much of the US. Outside that
| period, the recommendation for cooking tomatoes is
| generally to use canned because tomatoes are an example
| of something that doesn't ship well.
| wumbo wrote:
| That's why they're the best example.
|
| Grow your own and the difference is extreme between that
| and a mealy, flavorless storebought
| ghaff wrote:
| That assumes you care enough about tomatoes to grow them.
| My local farmstand probably does a better job than I
| could when they're in season which is true of most of
| what they sell.
| petsfed wrote:
| When I worked for an indoor-ag company whose big deal was
| picking varietals for flavor, rather than ability to
| travel across the country, I always pointed to how much
| tomatoes had changed in my lifetime as to why travel-
| ready produce was a problem.
|
| Remember when toothbrush advertising demonstrated how the
| brush was so soft it wouldn't affect a tomato, let alone
| your gums? That demonstration makes no sense now.
| bbarnett wrote:
| What gets me, is people don't _understand_.
|
| Stuff is often in season in the US, and at that time,
| it's generally good in the supermarket. Then there's when
| it's not in season.
|
| Contrast green beans shipped from 1500km away on a boat,
| arriving 2 weeks to a month later at the store, kept
| "fresh" by all sorts of waxy residue, and other "agents"
| sprayed on them with .... green beans canned within 2
| hours of being picked.
|
| Where I grew up, in a rural area, we had a local canning
| plant. They'd get farmers to plan to harvest on a
| schedule, and they'd literally be canning as the farmer
| drive trucks up with produce. No joke, they were canned
| within 2 hours, often faster, and that's how it's done
| these days.
|
| Which has more vitamins? Which has more nutrition? I'd
| lay a bet that the canned stuff is far better, _far_
| better than something that has artificial stuff sprayed
| on it so it looks good (artifical 'wax', and various
| chemicals to keep it "fresh"), and spent weeks getting to
| the supermarket.
|
| Oddly, I've seen people dump out the water in the can.
| What? That's where a lot of vitamins live!
| mtalantikite wrote:
| Oh, same with my father. He would tell stories about
| going to the markets in Algeria when he was a kid and how
| it was totally normal to have fruit sellers cut into a
| melon right then and there to give you a sample. If it
| sucked you just wouldn't buy it, so there was always
| competition for having the best produce in the market.
| And this was him complaining to me about poor quality
| produce in the US when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s --
| the quality has only gotten worse since then.
|
| Food just tastes better in other countries.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Food just tastes better in other countries.
|
| This should be corrected to fruit and vegetables taste
| better in regions where they are grown. Which is obvious,
| because picking them before they are ripe and
| transporting them thousands of kilometers for days or
| weeks is going to yield a less tasty fruit or vegetable.
| Also, plants bred for longevity of their fruit will
| obviously not be optimizing for taste.
| mtalantikite wrote:
| Sure, maybe! Although I've generally found that the
| overall quality of ingredients tends to be better in the
| places I've traveled compared to the US. That's not to
| say I haven't picked up great figs at a bodega in the
| mission, or don't get good berries at the farmers markets
| near me in NYC. But if I walk into the produce aisle in
| most grocery stores in the US these days there is
| abundance, yet a lack of quality.
|
| Personally, when it comes to fresh produce, I'd rather
| only be able to eat mostly what can be grown in season
| somewhat close to me (which would include greenhouses),
| rather than be able to get anything all year round and
| having it suck.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| As a general rule, fruits and vegetables are much better
| quality on the US west coast because so much of it is
| produced locally. The difference in produce quality is
| quite noticeable. In the parts of Europe where I've spent
| a lot of time, the average vegetable quality and
| selection is noticeably worse than e.g. Seattle, but that
| mostly reflects the Pacific Northwest being a major high-
| quality producer of surprisingly diverse fruit and
| vegetables.
| supportengineer wrote:
| By "Western cities" do you include the San Francisco Bay
| Area, when you shop at quality grocery stores? I keep
| hearing we are supposed to have some of the best food in
| the world.
| bumby wrote:
| > _People who live in Western cities have no fucking clue
| what fruits and vegetables are supposed to taste like._
|
| You really have to define what you mean by "supposed to
| taste like." As in "supposed to taste like what occurs in
| nature without human intervention" is very different than
| "supposed to taste like after humans have spent
| generations cultivating them to be the sweetest variety"
| which is different than "supposed to taste like when they
| are cultivated to optimize for logistics."
|
| I suspect what you're referring to with the tomatoes is
| the last example, because they have been grown and picked
| to best withstand transit.
| iamthirsty wrote:
| > They look like berries
|
| Americans shop with our eyes, not our mouths.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| > But at what cost? How much should we sacrifice so that
| blueberries exist year round?
|
| Look at the price tag on the blueberries. That is the cost.
|
| The opportunity cost is that the money could have neen
| spent on something else.
|
| The great thing about a free market is that if you think
| resources should be allocated elsewhere, you can do that.
| Your labor is your resource.
|
| I find greenhouses to be wonderfully environmentally
| friendly, and do not understand why someone would object to
| them.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| No. Price is an amalgamation and approximation of a lot
| of different factors rolled into one.
|
| Concepts like cost and value are much deeper and richer
| than economic cost and economic value.
| oblio wrote:
| > Look at the price tag on the blueberries. That is the
| cost.
|
| We're absolute garbage at including externalities like
| pollution or long term effects into prices. Look at
| incredibly cheap plastic. It's a massive danger to
| everything yet a plastic bag costs cents.
| keybored wrote:
| > It really is amazing, that's why we really need to
| appreciate and protect what we have. The incredible abundance
| we currently have is not the norm. It was not even 100 years
| ago that people were starving in the US during the great
| depression.
|
| This is fine and a good exercise (like a gratitude journal).
| The problem is that this is often used to tell people
| indirectly that they should stop with their political
| complaints, which may be well-founded. Like...
|
| > Think about this every time someone promotes extremist
| violent rhetoric.
|
| Like this?[1] I don't know what extremist means here but
| there are real political problems out there, and some of the
| solutions are "extremist" (like e.g. some of the solutions to
| climate change).
|
| Violence is less debatable and should be reserved for when it
| it truly necessary.
|
| [1] If you make vague gestures I in turn have to guess.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| > The problem is that this is often used to tell people
| indirectly that they should stop with their political
| complaints
|
| It's a tell that you conflate political complaints with
| extremist violent rhetoric.
| Folcon wrote:
| I would say that in this forum we try to be charitable to
| each other and it's certainly the way I like to conduct
| myself.
|
| The poster you're replying to has so far merely provided
| you with an opportunity to clarify or expand on what you
| would consider "extremist violent rhetoric".
|
| We're all pretty curious people here, and I would say
| reasonably opinionated, so I don't think it's
| unreasonable for someone to ask you to clarify your
| position.
|
| We're not going to get to the high level of discourse we
| like and expect in this space without a bit of curiosity
| and generous assumptions to our fellow posters =)...
| keybored wrote:
| Like I said, when you vaguely point to something in the
| Zeitgeist I have to guess. I made my assumption clear so
| don't try to make this into a gotcha.
|
| Specifically extremist, violent, political[1] rhetoric is
| subsumed by political complaints in general. So if you
| mean _conflate_ as in _draw an equivalence_ then that is
| clearly a wrong inference on your part.
|
| [1] This adjective wasn't in your original comment hence
| my _guess_.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| You don't seem to be following the site rule of
| "charitable interpretation" here. This reads more like
| "legalistic nitpicky interpretation" - that is, like bad
| faith.
|
| (Yes, good faith/charitable interpretation can lead to
| misunderstandings when some things are left unsaid. No, I
| don't think maximum nitpickiness is the answer to that.)
| afthonos wrote:
| As far as I use the term, extremists are people who
| advocate for tearing the system down via revolution and
| rebuilding from scratch. They have no idea what it takes to
| build this modern world, but they love the idea of
| guillotines.
| keybored wrote:
| Some people complain about taxation on tea or the lack
| thereof instead of appreciating how privileged they are
| to have access to Oriental tea.
| vsnf wrote:
| Not having a representative vote in parliament was kind
| of annoying, but what do I know
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| _Nitpick & a tangent, but:_
|
| Being properly represented in a democratic system is not
| the same as being able to vote for someone.
| vsnf wrote:
| Fair enough, the chant as we learned it was "no taxation
| without representation", so you win this one. But my
| point was that it wasn't just childish tantrums about
| taxes, it was also about being forced to buy into a
| monopoly, not getting any say in the matter, having local
| business blockaded, etc.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| For what it's worth: I wasn't at all disputing your
| general argument, just wanted to elaborate on a pet peeve
| of mine. Cheers!
| Jensson wrote:
| Those people didn't have abundance at that time, there
| were many better systems they could pick that they knew
| about at the time.
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| Sometimes you actually do need to rewrite the whole
| project in a new language. FORTRAN just isn't the tool
| for the job anymore. But you'd still benefit a good deal
| from being highly suspicious that any person suggesting
| that course of action is naive to how much time and
| suffering it will entail.
|
| Arguably, the American revolution wasn't even necessary.
| A lot of people died as a result. England would have
| potentially ended slavery decades earlier if the US was
| still a colony. Canada and Australia wound up in roughly
| the same spot without a revolution (though possibly as a
| second order effect of the American revolution).
| pklausler wrote:
| Why is modern Fortran no longer the right tool for a job?
| bumby wrote:
| > _FORTRAN just isn 't the tool for the job anymore._
|
| This underscores the problem with generalities. I know of
| some applications that would be considered high-speed
| (both literally and figuratively, since they are related
| to rocket testing) that still rely on FORTRAN. So I think
| your statement needs some qualifies (what kinds of jobs?)
| ToValueFunfetti wrote:
| I guess I should have put quotes around that. It was
| intended as a specific example of when that decision
| might make sense; you're using the wrong language for the
| job because it was the best choice when you started the
| project decades ago. I didn't mean to suggest that
| FORTRAN is not the tool for _any_ job.
| cess11 wrote:
| I think most people would consider liberalism rather
| mainstream.
| iamthirsty wrote:
| Depends on your point of view, and what you're referring
| to.
|
| The word means two different things, depending on your
| side of the spectrum.
| cess11 wrote:
| Weird vague-posting.
|
| Are you aware of some mainstream liberalism that didn't
| kick off with guillotines or muskets? Then make it clear.
| mistermann wrote:
| What do you call people who attach _speculative_
| pejorative labels to those who dare to suggest that
| action should be considered because the status quo may be
| similarly risky?
|
| Don't forget: the status quo is what got us into our
| various pickles in the first place.
| petsfed wrote:
| I understood the "extremist violent rhetoric" to refer
| specifically to accelerationists (in the states, we have
| the Boogaloo boys, but there are others), whose explicit
| goal is to accelerate the (from their perspective)
| inevitible collapse of the current order, to replace it
| with their own order. Often times, but not always, this is
| married to a both a doomsday-prepper I-can-go-it-alone
| mentality, as well as a libertarian theory of government.
| keybored wrote:
| There are currently many different extremist groups out
| there. So I don't know why you went with that.
| petsfed wrote:
| Because unlike other kinds of extremist, violent,
| revolutionary political movements, those from the
| accelerationist + prepper mindset are explicitly opposed
| to modern life. Think Ted Kaczynski (that is, the
| Unabomber).
|
| Not all violent extremists are focused on tearing down
| the modern technological order. ISIS, for instance, is
| only interested in the end of modern morality, but
| (evidently, based on their PR/recruiting arm) have no
| special qualms with modern media technology,
| industrialization, etc. The Red Army Faction was only
| opposed to the modern (at the time) government of Germany
| and a poorly defined concept of capitalism. But there is
| a specific kind of violent extremist who thinks that
| computers and mass production and factory farming are the
| problem. And I understood the GP to be referring to them.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| I was intentionally vague and not picking sides. Extremist
| violent rhetoric encompasses communists and fascists and
| anyone else willing to kill people to tear the system down.
|
| If you think I'm talking about the Israel / Palestine
| thing. It was not what I was thinking about. I was thinking
| about the US specifically but it also applies to other
| nations with strong personal freedoms, rule of law, and
| general economic prosperity. Advocating for revolution in
| such places is very dumb.
| nradov wrote:
| The Haber-Bosch process also played a major role there. It
| was around 100 years ago that cheap nitrogen fertilizer
| manufactured from fossil fuels started to become widely
| available. That greatly reduced starvation, at least in
| countries with functional governments.
| pfdietz wrote:
| This was then combined with the Green Revolution, where
| crops were modified to truly take advantage of abundant
| artificial fertilizer. Before that, too much nitrogen would
| make wheat (for example) grow so tall and top heavy it
| would fall over, reducing yield in a process called
| "lodging".
|
| The fact that would amaze Franklin is that only about 1% of
| Americans are farmers.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > would blow the minds
|
| I think there are two aspects to this. I think anyone who's
| ever been to a food market in the history of time would
| conceptually understand it's possible to have a bigger market,
| and perhaps even a faster horse or mechanical bird to bring the
| items there. Commerce bringing you items from the other side of
| the world is millennia old. So I think it would be more of a
| case of "how did u mad lads actually pull this off", rather
| than a true mind-blown situation.
|
| True mind-blown'ness I think comes from other examples he
| brings up, like GPS, and making items apparently hover a
| hundred miles above the earth and transmit information from
| above there, instantly, silently and invisibly. That's
| supernatural stuff, and the realm of the holy or the uncanny.
| You can't go back very far in time without talking about that
| stuff getting you accused of heresy / talking to the devil.
| perlgeek wrote:
| The real progress with the supermarket is the availability
| and ubiquity.
|
| Maybe 80% of US Americans now have access to a larger variety
| of fresh fruits than even most nobles had 200 years ago, and
| it's not even a big deal to us.
|
| Project that kind of progress another 200 years in the
| future... it's hard to imagine how that would even look like.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >another 200 years in the future
|
| Tea, earl grey, hot.
| ertgbnm wrote:
| I think people would have a deeper appreciation for what a
| super market is because they could understand it since it's
| exactly the kind of thing they would imagine a utopia would
| have. Throughout most of history people have spent most of
| their time worrying about food.
|
| Air conditioning, satellites, and CAT scans are just too far
| beyond imagination that I don't think it would be fully
| appreciated.
| eleveriven wrote:
| Food security remains a critical issue in certain parts of
| the world still I think
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Yeah that's what I was thinking of when paying at the
| supermarket. Try explaining contactless payments to someone
| from 18th century.
| nico wrote:
| This is still mind blowing and a huge luxury for most of the
| world
|
| "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed"
| - William Gibson
| eleveriven wrote:
| It's so pity that it is hard to create a future that is truly
| inclusive and sustainable for all
| anonporridge wrote:
| It is hard, but we've proven to be really fucking good at
| doing hard things.
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/distribution-of-
| populatio...
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Packaging made from aluminum that is just thrown away?
|
| Well, aluminum was supposed to be luxurious and everything...
| But I think before that they'd pick a piece of plastic
| packaging and be without words to explain their marvel.
| b3ing wrote:
| They didn't have plastic back then, it would of been paper or
| cloth
| keybored wrote:
| It seems utilitarian to the person who doesn't understand the
| concept of microplastics.
| genewitch wrote:
| bakelite was patented in 1909 - i understand franklin was
| before 1907, but the idea of "plastic" as something separate
| from wood, metal, and glass has been around over a century.
| Intralexical wrote:
| Bakelite also wasn't very good though. Stiff, heavy,
| brittle.
|
| Modern sheet plastic packaging gives the impression of a
| soap bubble that we've somehow frozen in time and made
| solid.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| It brings to mind the story of how when Boris Yeltsin was
| visiting the US, he took an impromptu detour to a random
| American supermarket to try to catch them off guard, only to be
| blown away that Americans really did have supermarkets
| everywhere practically overflowing with food. The story goes
| that the experience played a big role in shaping his vision for
| Russia when he went on to become its first freely elected
| leader a few years later.
|
| https://www.cato.org/blog/happy-yeltsin-supermarket-day
|
| Or similarly there's the story of the Lykov family, who lived
| life cut off from humanity for 40 years but still somewhat
| understood what the new, moving "stars" in the night sky must
| be: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-
| rus...
|
| Edit - Plus, this quote: "What amazed him most of all," Peskov
| recorded, "was a transparent cellophane package. 'Lord, what
| have they thought up--it is glass, but it crumples!'"
| bee_rider wrote:
| Although, Yeltsin was already a liberalizing reformer. I
| wouldn't be surprised if he was playing it up a bit.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Yeah, I do take it with a grain of salt since it's a very
| convenient propaganda story, and it'd be a stretch to say
| that he formed his political platform just 2 years before
| actually being elected.
| Jensson wrote:
| You can think something is better without believing that
| they are as much better as they claim to be.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I'd consider that to be implied. Put differently, the
| 'grain of salt' is that I consider the effects to be
| overstated, not non-existent.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| There's still a difference between the stores having meat
| on their shelves and the stores having _every kind of meat_
| on their shelves. And every kind of vegetable, every kind
| of drink, every kind of cheese as well.
| brabel wrote:
| Even though the choice is impressive in any supermarket
| you go, unfortunately, it's very far from having every
| kind of drink/cheese or almost anything else you mention.
| Perhaps that's being pedantic, but I believe a lot of
| people seem to actually believe that what's in their
| supermarket is all there is (not talking about you
| specifically)... all you need to do is travel around
| Europe for a little while to quickly realize how much the
| supermarkets do not have.
| chihuahua wrote:
| That's probably because supermarkets tend to stock those
| things that sell in reasonable volume. So if you're in an
| area where sheep's brains (to pick a contrived example)
| would sit on the shelf for months, they're unlikely to
| stock it.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I had a classmate whose father was posted to Yakutsk with
| Strategic Rocket Forces, and he encountered a warehouse
| full of cow lips (presumably shipped in from all over the
| Soviet Union)
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > every kind of vegetable, .., every kind of cheese as
| well.
|
| That's not my experience of American supermarkets in
| North Carolina when visiting on business ten years ago.
| Even in supposedly upmarket supermarkets like Harris
| Teeter the fruit and veg was really not very good and the
| selection of cheeses (and other dairy products) was
| downright poor.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| I was exaggerating a bit, but by the late 80's the food
| situation in the USSR had deteriorated to the stage where
| you would have _a_ meat (if you were lucky), _a_ cheese
| or _a_ vegetable available at any given store. We would
| go to the kolkhoz market for vegetables and my parents
| had a literal backroom deal with a grocery store manager
| to get beef, but the shelves were conspicuously barren.
|
| Going from this to a country where any random supermarket
| would have chicken, several cuts of beef, several cuts of
| pork, tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, onions, several
| sorts of cheese and was not at risk of running out of any
| position would have been a shock.
| ramblenode wrote:
| If you think the average American supermarket has _every
| kind_ of meat, cheese, drink, and vegetable, you are in
| for a big surprise traveling the world.
|
| In many ways American markets have fallen behind
| relatively poorer countries in variety. Most of what is
| sold are monocultures and packaged foods. The selection
| of fresh produce (or any produce) is often disappointing.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Yep. For example, one staple dish of Cajuns is called
| "rice and gravy." Essentially, you sear thinly cut
| 7-steaks, remove them, cook down some trinity, then add
| the steaks back with some water or broth and seasonings.
| That's it. The steaks simmer in the broth for hours and
| create their own gravy. We serve it over rice, usually
| accompanied by some roux peas (tres petit pois cooked in
| a roux with onions and bacon) and cornbread. Simple,
| easy, flavorful.
|
| But I live in Texas now, home of all the cattle, if you
| believe the marketing. And I can't find 7-steaks unless I
| go to a Mexican meat market, because the DFW area is so
| bourgeois nowadays that the steaks simply don't pass
| muster for the local market. Hell, I'm more likely than
| not to end up in a Mexican market simply because the
| produce is better and cheaper.
|
| Same with beef shank. Osso bucco is traditionally made
| with veal shank, and oxtails are all the rage, but I
| can't find beef shank unless I go to an HEB. Most places
| don't carry the cut. And if I couldn't find beef shank, I
| could always go with beef neckbones, but uh... HEB is the
| only place around me that sells that either.
| marssaxman wrote:
| > cook down some trinity
|
| I've never heard that term; does it refer to mirepoix?
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Yes. "Holy trinity" locally.
| jfengel wrote:
| Close. It substitutes green pepper for the carrots. It
| serves pretty much the same culinary purpose as mirepoix.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Are 7 steaks the same as hamburger steaks? e:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/7-bone_roast
|
| I guess I'll know now what it means to miss New Orleans
| when I leave. And here I was worrying about not being
| able to find collards and turkey necks.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Yeah, that's a 7 steak. I guess most people sorta see it
| as a trash cut, but it's got enough fat in the spaces
| between muscles that it ends up being a nice gravy.
| Collards and turkey necks are not hard to find out here.
| Just don't ever expect to find any good hoghead cheese. I
| tried some Boar's Head recently and that reminded me of
| the 1970s era images of stuff suspended in aspic.
| rmccue wrote:
| As someone who's not American, I'm unclear; is going to a
| butcher not an option? Have they been competed out of the
| market by supermarkets?
| chasd00 wrote:
| from a google search: "A 7 bone steak is a cut of beef
| from the chuck section of a cow's front shoulder, which
| is considered a tough area of the animal.". You're not
| going to find that in a regular grocery store because not
| many people will buy it. You will find every other cut of
| beef, pork, and poultry considered edible though.
|
| You can go to a butcher but they're less common than a
| regular grocery store. Also, butchers usually have less
| selection since they're a smaller operation.
|
| EDIT: i live in Dallas, Texas and "HEB" is just another
| brand of grocery store so "having to go to HEB" just
| means having to go to the grocery store.
| rmccue wrote:
| > Also, butchers usually have less selection since
| they're a smaller operation.
|
| That's curious; I'd have thought you'd have _more_
| selection since the butcher is, y'know, doing the
| butchering, so any cut is possible. In the past if I've
| needed an "exotic" cut, the butcher would be where I'd
| go.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| In most places I've lived, including Seattle, butchers
| typically buy the whole animal. They move smaller
| quantities but every possible cut of meat is available,
| you just have to ask. They may run out of a cut, since
| availability scales with the number animals they butcher
| and demand is uneven over the entire animal, or you might
| want something unusual outside the scope of their default
| breakdown of the animal, but you can always ask them to
| reserve that part from the next animal and they've always
| been happy to oblige in my experience.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Boston here. Market Basket always has 7bone, Costco never
| does.
|
| Different stores, different clientele.
| dingnuts wrote:
| lol Dallas is the only major city in Texas where "going
| to the store" doesn't almost always means HEB, too
|
| also, complaining that you can't find Thing unless you go
| to a Mexican meat market is a weird way to boast that
| your area has specialty grocery stores.
| hansvm wrote:
| I don't have many butchers within 30 miles, and their
| selection is almost always a subset of what I can get at
| the larger grocers.
| derefr wrote:
| The selection they have _pre-cut and on display_ is a
| subset.
|
| But unlike a supermarket, you can just ask a local
| butcher to save you some of whatever off-cut the next
| time they're trimming it. Normally they'd just throw it
| away.
| nickff wrote:
| Butchers are less common than supermarkets, and generally
| more expensive, but most places have them.
| efa wrote:
| There are butchers in the supermarkets (at least the one
| I go to)
| prisenco wrote:
| Walmart is 25% of grocery sales in the US and they only
| have pre-packaged meat because 22 years ago, some
| butchers tried to unionized.
| autokad wrote:
| > Although, Yeltsin was already a liberalizing reformer. I
| wouldn't be surprised if he was playing it up a bit.
|
| I don't think so. People don't realize how bad it was in
| the Soviet Union.
|
| There's a story of two hockey players that came to the NHL.
| One went to the grocery store, he was completely taken back
| by how much was there, especially meat. He thought it was a
| mistake and didn't want to miss the opportunity so he
| bought it all up. He called his friend who also recently
| defected to the NLH, and his friend said "Same thing
| happened here!"
| agumonkey wrote:
| Also, it's easy to take basic necessities for granted.
| Only when you experienced hunger you realise how having
| plenty of affordable food is a luxury.
| brightball wrote:
| People used to tell stories of visiting Russia and having
| people try to buy their blue jeans off of them while
| walking down the street.
| toss1 wrote:
| Yes, can confirm. I personally know multiple people who
| have had that exact experience; one just mentioned it
| last weekend. If they knew in advance they traveled with
| an extra suitcase full of jeans to sell, not so much for
| the money, but to make/help friends.
|
| It was also not uncommon for Soviet residents to queue up
| for whatever anyone was selling when it became available
| -- Size 14 galoshes that will not even close to fit you?
| Get in line, buy as many as they'll sell you. You can
| sell/trade them later for something else.
|
| I've also been in situations with live hyperinflation,
| like 10% per week. The strategies people came up with to
| deal with that were also amazing.
|
| In the modern western societies, most people have
| literally zero idea of how far (or fast) things can go
| off the rails, or what that looks like.
|
| It is a great privilege to live in such profound blissful
| ignorance, and it is not appreciated.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > I've also been in situations with live hyperinflation,
| like 10% per week.
|
| I don't know if it's because I have experienced it, but
| 10%/week inflation doesn't sound anything near as bleak
| as "basic necessities are only available every other
| month".
| dingnuts wrote:
| maybe it's because cash is just one asset.. at least if
| goods exist, you can barter for them, if the cash isn't
| any good
|
| if the necessities just aren't there because, oh I don't
| know, you took the farms from the farmers because they
| owned land and owning property was deemed evil, and then
| the crops failed[1], then they just aren't available and
| it doesn't matter how much money or gold or any other
| commodity you might have to exchange for them
|
| 1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
| toss1 wrote:
| Yes, while I did not go to the USSR, the accounts I've
| heard from friends definitely sounded worse than
| hyperinflation. While hyperinflaion did rapidly make
| necessities rather difficult and required daily juggling,
| I didn't see the kinds of deprivation I repeatedly heard
| reported from USSR. Heck, even today, 20% of Russians
| have no indoor plumbing, as in they have to use outhouses
| [0]
|
| [0] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/04/02/indoor-
| plumbing-st...
| taneq wrote:
| Give it six months and you'll understand. Basic
| necessities are available for money, until they aren't
| because money stops working.
|
| Edit: Six months of 10%/wk hyperinflation, I meant, not
| that some crazy hyperinflation is going to hit you
| personally within six months.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| The meat thing was not an isolated incident.
|
| Finland had close enough relationship with the USSR that
| for the duration of the cold war, there were constantly
| some Soviet students and research scientists doing
| exchange programs in Finnish universities. When they
| first arrived in Finland, they were assigned a
| translator/guide whose job was, among other things,
| taking them grocery shopping. Because if they did that
| alone, a lot of them would end up buying their fridge
| full of meat. Because "meat days", meaning the day the
| local store happens to have meat, just were a normal
| thing that everyone adjusted to in the USSR.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| Many in Yeltsin's circle believed it had been set up, and was
| not actually used by everyday Americans, similar to how many
| Soviet PR setups had been undertaken
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Potemkin supermarkets.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| The word you want is "pokazukha"
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| No, GP wanted to use potemkin referring to the villages
| allegedly built on the Dnieper for the Russian czarina
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village)
| filoleg wrote:
| Both are valid.
|
| "Pokazukha" is more of a modern term (modern as in, i
| dont think it even hit the 80 year old mark) and is a bit
| more generic (refers to "showing off" or "for show" in
| general).
|
| "Potemkin supermarket" is a reference to "potemkin
| village"[0], which has been around as a term since late
| 18th century, and it is a bit more specific (refers to a
| construction that provides a false facade to a situation,
| with the origin of it being an actual fake village
| constructed to impress the empress).
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potemkin_village
| jhbadger wrote:
| Also in English, "Potemkin X" is the standard phrase,
| even when referring to post-Tsarist times (and sometimes
| even to refer to non-Russian cases like Potemkin villages
| in North Korea to fool visiting Japanese of Korean
| descent as to quality of life in NK). I have never seen
| "Pokazukha" used in English at all.
| glompers wrote:
| Good links, thanks. I had read the Houston anecdote before
| but never seen this photograph.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Yeltsin visit is to put in contrast with Tucker Carlson visit
| in Russia.. where he somehow tried to do the same in reverse
| (without knowing he was actually visiting a french retail
| chain brand but anyway). Very odd.
| odiroot wrote:
| > More than anything else, I think the modern American super
| market would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more
| than any other marvel that exists.
|
| Modern American supermarket would blow the minds of anyone from
| the Warsaw Pact countries ;), up until probably mid 1990's.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| There is a video where it literally blows the mind of an
| immigrant from Cuba:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBA41QgIty8
| mavhc wrote:
| Literally literally, or metaphorically literally?
| brabel wrote:
| "It literally blew his mind" doesn't mean what people
| nowadays think it means :D
| Karellen wrote:
| ...but you repeat yourself
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Literally, in that he is unable to process things, just
| in the same way my fuse blows - it is resettable.
|
| Not literallly in the cartoon sense.
| chasd00 wrote:
| on top of it all, they took him to an Aldi which is pretty
| small/basic. They should have taken him to a large Central
| Market.
| more_corn wrote:
| And yet a lot of people go hungry in this age of marvels. We
| have enough homes to house all the homeless, we have agencies,
| money, social workers. And yet we somehow can't seem to figure
| it out.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| We can. It's just uncomfortable to admit. For example, making
| housing an investment steals from the poor to give to the
| rich.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| You can frankly tell when something is bullshit when it
| involves defining new increasingly fantastic and phantasmal
| forms of theft. It inevitably devolves into some sort of
| bastardization of voodoo.
|
| Just looking at the number of houses and the number of
| homeless is itself deeply misleading for what should be
| fairly obvious reasons. If someone operated a model
| simplistic enough that concluded there should be no deaths
| of dehydration in Africa given the flow rate of the Nile
| river is more than sufficient to hydrate them, you would
| call said hypothetical person intensely dim for believing
| that conclusion or model of reality. Yet when it comes to
| housing suddenly that incredibly over-simplistic to the
| point of being idiotic model it becomes a political
| rallying cry.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Would you take the concept more seriously if I'd used
| 'taking' instead of 'stealing'?
| swatcoder wrote:
| I agree that a modern _grocer_ or _butcher_ might wow them, but
| it 's way less given that contemporary _supermarkets_ would.
|
| Those supermarkets are a product of a far more modern and
| culturally specific consumerism, which is not so innate as you
| might think. Many of us have been raised into and it's been
| gradually exported around the world, but it's the food
| equivalent of free to play MMO -- overstimulating,
| manipulative, confusing, and in many ways far divorced from the
| far more universal basics of buying food to cook and eat.
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| And a whole aisle full of splinter-free toiler paper![1]
|
| [1] https://www.historydefined.net/splinter-free-toilet-paper-
| di...
| mikestew wrote:
| Is that whole site just LLM-generated crap? About the only
| thing that link has to do with "splinter-free toilet paper"
| is that those words exist in the post, and yet telling me
| nothing about the topic. I cross-checked another post
| (because everyone has a bad writing day), and yup, more of
| the same.
| ghaff wrote:
| The mind would be perhaps be not quite as blown but the modern
| large urban area supermarket would be pretty mindblowing to
| someone from the 1960s. You _could_ probably get a lot of the
| stuff the random gourmet-ish cook might want but it would
| probably involve some combination of Saturday farmer 's markets
| --which might have other things like beef--(which my mother did
| with some regularity), maybe a separate fish market (ditto), a
| specialty gourmet store, ethnic market, etc.
|
| And, as you say, things like out of season fruits and
| vegetables or the variety of things like spices and teas would
| be largely unavailable outside of maybe specialty stores in the
| largest cities.
| eleveriven wrote:
| I sometimes think that modern American super market would blow
| the minds of a lot of people nowadays too
| pfdietz wrote:
| There's a reason some people celebrate when Wegmans opens
| near them.
| metadat wrote:
| And why would bread be full of sand and grit?
| NateEag wrote:
| Because using millstones to grind grains into flour leaves
| traces of sand and stone grit in the flour.
|
| It's really hard on the teeth long-term, IIUC.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Keeps the ol' colon moving right along tho'
| buildsjets wrote:
| Thresh a bushel of wheat by hand by tossing it in the open
| air outdoors, and let us know the results of your experiment.
| ks2048 wrote:
| This would blow many people's minds, but *more than* the
| magical rectangle in our pockets that plays endless moving
| pictures and sounds and all the world's information? Oh and
| talk (with live images) of people instantly across the globe?
| Not even close.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Reminds me of the story of the VERY early German settlers in
| Louisiana. They didn't have work animals such as horses or food
| / sustenance animals such as cows for the first decade of their
| time settling here (and to be clear, cows were used ONLY for
| milk... killing cows was a crime in early colonial Louisiana).
| Clearing the land for farming? The Company des Indes gave them
| each a pickaxe, a hoe, and a spade.
|
| The progenitor of the Folse family in particular cleared the
| land, then became ill with malarial fever all summer, and then
| a hurricane flooded his property. 2 years after his arrival, he
| managed to harvest an entire 7 barrels worth of rice, which he
| had to hand-transport from the Hahnville area of modern day St.
| Charles Parish to New Orleans for sale.
|
| One of the reasons the people there had such good relationships
| with the local native Americans (and why Creole Louisiana is
| such a melting pot to this day) is that they didn't have time
| to focus on procuring meat, so instead they would trade their
| crops with the natives, while the natives went hunting for meat
| and taught the children how to hunt, too.
| wordsinaline wrote:
| Can you explain the sand and grit part?
| bongoman42 wrote:
| Poor quality grinding of grains and adulteration can leave
| sand and grit in the flour. Still happens sometimes in places
| like India at least.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| There are tradeoffs of course, its not all a direct upgrade.
| The deli section has certainly gotten a lot worse than 100
| years ago. No capicola anywhere that I've seen. Cheese
| offerings leave a lot to be desired now that they've been
| reduced to the same half dozen usual suspects. All the food in
| that deli might be entirely monopolized by boars head or dietz
| and watson. Pickles, same thing with the vlassic/mt olive race
| to the bottom. I'm not even sure we can really honestly say the
| bread situation has improved other than the fact a machine now
| slices it.
| wayeq wrote:
| Kind of rough for those of us that prefer sand and grit
| unsliced break though..
| nsguy wrote:
| Sliced bread is a step in the wrong direction though ;)
| Bendy wrote:
| "The future is going to be boring." - J. G. Ballard
| genewitch wrote:
| "Scientists are saying the future is going to be far more
| futuristic than originally thought" - Krista Now
| marssaxman wrote:
| Writing to you from several decades into the future of my own
| past, I can confirm that this is definitely the case.
| ativzzz wrote:
| Is it the future that's boring or do we just lose our sense
| of wonder as we age and become jaded about the world?
| gmuslera wrote:
| There are emergent processes that would make people from some
| centuries ago wonder how they ever become to be. And it goes
| beyond technology. Pervasive internet, information and social
| networks, are technologies, but how that has changed us, how we
| relate to others, wherever they are, and how we see the world
| should be something to marvel about, for good and bad.
| flobosg wrote:
| > The big science news on Friday was that for the first time we
| have done this for an insect brain.
|
| If I'm not wrong, the _Drosophila_ connectome was released last
| year.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| It's refreshing to see a rare openly optimistic article about the
| world here first thing in the morning.
|
| I also like to occasionally appreciate how someone from even just
| the recent past would see our current world as one full of
| manmade wonders.
|
| Another one of these would be microwaves, although conceptually
| simple as a box that heats stuff, it'd be pretty mind bending
| that it does it essentially wirelessly.
|
| Adding on to the point about going to the Moon being universally
| mind blowing, I think it would be (and still is) even more mind
| blowing that we stopped doing that and didn't bother trying for
| 50 years, in large part because the people of the time lost
| interest...
| lordgrenville wrote:
| Considering that it's staggeringly expensive and there's not
| much to see there, it seems like the right decision to hold off
| once we'd established it could be done.
| somenameforme wrote:
| Except in a parallel world where we continued forward making
| advances in space we could already be a defacto post-scarcity
| species (as far as materials are concerned at least),
| exporting our heavy carbon producing industries to the Moon -
| simultaneously helping create an atmosphere there, while
| avoiding any climate impact here, have effectively infinite
| land to expand outward into, countless high paying jobs
| perpetuating all of this across the entire solar system if
| not beyond. And so on endlessly.
|
| Instead we're sending toy rovers to Mars, unable to solve
| climate change in any way that has any chance of actually
| moving forward, trending rapidly towards WW3 as nations'
| schemes invariably turn towards each other, with no grand
| outlet for expansion/growth to otherwise occupy themselves.
| And so on endlessly. I think it's quite a poor direction
| we've chosen.
|
| And I'd also add that this is assuming there are no
| revolutionary discoveries out there awaiting discovery. It's
| basically impossible to imagine something like
| electricity/electromagnetism before its discovery. As we live
| on a single planet in a virtually endless - and ever stranger
| - universe, one can only imagine how many other revolutionary
| discoveries, things we cannot even really imagine today,
| await our eventual discovery. It's hard to know what we don't
| know, but I think there is probably a rather tremendous
| amount. And it seems reasonable to expect that exploring the
| cosmos is one way of taking us closer to it.
| at_compile_time wrote:
| >exporting our heavy carbon producing industries to the
| Moon
|
| Never study rocketry, it wil ruin your whimsical innocence.
| throwaway11460 wrote:
| It's very fortunate that rockets are not the only way to
| get stuff into space, and more importantly, that we don't
| need to literally bring a whole factory and the input
| materials up on a rocket but instead use resources
| available in space.
|
| Even if we actually had to bring everything from Earth,
| Starship is cheap and powerful enough to build an orbital
| ring which would make orbital lift nearly too cheap to
| meter.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > It's very fortunate that rockets are not the only way
| to get stuff into space
|
| I don't see any of the alternatives ever being
| competitive.
| aftbit wrote:
| Someone needs to hurry up and build a von Neumann probe
| already.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| While I can understand that as a reason for not sending crew
| there, we didn't even send uncrewed landers. The result being
| that now our technology has changed so much that we have to
| relearn how to autonomously land there. If we had been
| sending the occasional lander, we would've smoothly
| transitioned from the technology of then to the technology of
| now.
| Nevermark wrote:
| It remained staggeringly expensive because the Space Shuttle
| was a disastrous design to follow up the lunar rockets. It
| held up the space program half a century in some ways.
|
| It reduced the manned program to Earth orbit, was supposed to
| be highly reusable to reduce launch costs, but didn't work
| out that way. And of course, it was supposed to be reliable
| and safer.
|
| If we had continued going to the moon, even infrequently, or
| aimed further, we would have had no choice but to actually
| achieve reusability, safety and reliability much sooner.
|
| (In the meantime, ... NASA's current manned program isn't
| better. Multi-billion dollar throw away rockers. Good thing
| someone validated reusable first stages and space craft, and
| is working to eliminate non-reusable second stages.)
| aftbit wrote:
| Foolish short-sighted take. Imagine if the same opinion held
| during the age of sail. There's literally more resources than
| are currently controlled by our entire planet in the asteroid
| belt, and a lunar colony (at least a refueling station in
| space) would be a huge boon to anyone who wants to go explore
| further.
|
| If that's not good enough, how about outsourcing our shitty
| resource extraction and polluting manufacturing to space,
| where there's no life to care about the waste and disruption?
|
| Not to mention that if space flight were commonly available
| and cheap today (more feasible than you seem to think -
| remember computers were once phenomenally expensive and now
| they're so cheap as to be thrown away), more could experience
| the overview effect, the cognitive shift that comes when you
| see Earth hanging in the void of space. That would probably
| make humanity better to each other and our planet.
|
| Or what about the fact that the Apollo program basically
| launched our discipline of computer science? Surely there was
| more to be learned and discovered from striving to make
| spaceflight routine. If only we had a generation of
| scientists and engineers working on hard science problems
| rather than ad-tech, the world would be a much better today
| place.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The problem with arguments by analogy is they inherently
| assume the analogy is valid. It's a circular argument.
|
| The "cognitive shift" thing is just BS some space fans made
| up to sell their cult.
|
| And no, Apollo did not launch "our discipline of computer
| science". Talk about spinoff inflation!
| somenameforme wrote:
| Re: Moon landing -
|
| It had very little to do with people losing interest. In 1972
| Nixon defacto completely cancelled the human space program,
| which he had been rapidly stripping away since Apollo 13. He
| was paranoid that a catastrophic failure was imminent and would
| negatively affect his 1972 election campaign. Interestingly
| when he signed off on the final stripping down in 1972, he
| remarked that we may never set foot on the Moon again this
| century. That would've sounded quite absurd at the time, but
| was ultimately completely correct.
|
| It's kind of ironic that the stereotypical context of the space
| race was it supposedly having been a proxy for an ideological
| battle between capitalism and communism. Yet the US space
| program existed solely and exclusively due to a large and
| heavily centralized governmental effort. It's only in very
| modern times that private companies can take to the stars,
| completely independent of governments, which is why we've been
| able to make vastly made more progress in the past 10 years
| than we did in the 40 prior.
|
| A good starting point off for going down this rabbit hole would
| probably be here. [1]
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canceled_Apollo_missions
| dotnet00 wrote:
| That covers the cancellation of Apollo, but the fact that we
| didn't even put an uncrewed lander on the Moon within the 50
| years in between is indicative of a lack of general interest,
| since we've had several presidents in these 50 years.
|
| Still, this did lead me to the discovery that apparently the
| often made claim that viewership of the landings waned after
| Apollo 11 doesn't seem to have any clear evidence besides the
| point that Apollo 11 had the highest live viewer count until
| apparently the most recent Superbowl. The EVA camera was
| damaged in Apollo 12, and 13 was just poorly covered by the
| media until the crew encountered trouble.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I don't think what happens in politics is a great proxy for
| interest. Lots of things with high interest levels never
| happen - federal digital privacy laws or federal right to
| repair laws for instance. And, vice versa, lots that are
| exceptionally unpopular get passed with exceptional
| rapidity - spying laws and copyright lasting until the heat
| death of the universe laws are a couple of examples there.
|
| Most polls since the end of the Apollo program have shown
| strong and growing interest in space. Here's [1] the most
| recent I could find - a 2018 Pew poll. 72% consider it
| essential that the US continue to be a world leader in
| space exploration, 80% agree that the ISS has been a good
| investment for the country, 63% consider it important (45%)
| or top priority (18%) to send astronauts to Mars, and so
| on.
|
| [1] -
| https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2018/06/06/majority-
| of-a...
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > It's only in very modern times that private companies can
| take to the stars, completely independent of governments...
|
| Are there any private companies putting humans in space
| without huge government grants, launch facilities, or ex-gov
| talent?
| dotnet00 wrote:
| The 'huge government grants' thing is doing a lot of
| (excuse the pun) heavy lifting, as are launch facilities
| and ex-gov talent.
|
| The government is a customer on Crew Dragon, it's a
| government 'grant' if you consider it a grant when the
| government pays money to a company for stationary
| specifically designed for the government (say, with the
| respective agency's logo on it). Similarly, the launch
| facilities are being leased and heavily customized by
| private companies for their requirements. You can't just
| prop up a launch complex anywhere, and the best spots are
| where the government owned ones have been built already.
|
| Ex-gov talent is similarly complicated because there is
| obviously a lot of exchange between NASA and industry,
| especially since the space industry is growing rapidly and
| has high barriers to entry constraining talent
| availability. For example, a lot of smaller new space
| companies are founded by people who have previously worked
| at SpaceX, but it'd be weird to say that those companies
| are not independent of SpaceX just because that's where
| their founders previously gained their industry credentials
| from.
|
| The important point in terms of independence is that during
| Apollo, NASA dictated the design in detail to companies,
| the company's job was to build what NASA told them to, then
| NASA would take ownership of it all and be responsible for
| running the show. The companies couldn't choose to do
| whatever they wanted with the designs. Now, with
| independent private space exploration, NASA just presents
| its requirements (safety, destination, crew, payload,
| availability etc). Companies present their proposals, NASA
| decides which ones fit its requirements best and promises
| them fixed payments for achieving specific milestones. The
| risk of cost overruns, failures etc is entirely on the
| company. The design is developed primarily by the company,
| and it belongs to them, NASA is essentially just along for
| the ride like any passenger.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| I'd still say that's not "completely independent". One
| might even say it's just outsourcing NASA's once many
| teams to different companies.
|
| Also I doubt these companies would be as numerous or as
| big without the promise of fat government contracts
| looming on the horizon.
| thombat wrote:
| NASA had only contracted for 15 Saturn V stacks, and in 1968
| declined to start the second production run. That was still
| under Johnson - although Nixon was doubtless happy with the
| decision it had already become obvious that Congress wasn't
| going to approve sustaining the NASA budget at that level
| once the moon was in the bag.
| hnbad wrote:
| This reminds me of how the sad state of fiber broadband in
| Germany is ultimately the result of 1990s chancellor Helmut
| Kohl (the one who saw over the reunification, consequently
| selling off the East German public property to private
| investors for scraps) thinking that public TV was too hostile
| to him and wanting to empower private broadcasters by
| publicly funding cable television, which delayed the
| investment in fiber broadband by repurposing cable for
| broadband as a stop-gap solution.
|
| Basically a long-running chancellor in the 1990s wanted to
| push media that presented him more favorably and that's why
| thirty years later our Internet is slow.
| titzer wrote:
| > it supposedly having been a proxy for an ideological battle
|
| More than anything, it was a proxy for developing ICBMs and
| other space capabilities (e.g. satellites) for fighting the
| cold war.
| adwn wrote:
| > _Yet the US space program existed solely and exclusively
| due to a large and heavily centralized governmental effort._
|
| That's not quite the right conclusion to draw from this. The
| US could afford to put a humongous amount of resources into
| its space program _because_ of the productive output
| unleashed by capitalism and a market-based economy. For
| example, the US spent a lot of money on a brute-force
| approach to fixing the combustion instability problems in the
| huge F-1 engines through trial-and-error; the USSR could not
| afford to do this, and was forced to go with a much larger
| number of smaller engines (which due to budgetary constraints
| couldn 't be tested together before the actual launch, with
| catastrophic consequences).
| jrgd wrote:
| "It's a bit fiddly because time isn't passing at the same rate
| for the device as it is for the satellites, but we were able to
| work it out."
|
| that just knocked my brain down.
| yen223 wrote:
| The fact that we worked it out _before_ sending out those
| satellites is a minor miracle in of itself
| genewitch wrote:
| Yeah, the idea that you can triangulate from the delay in
| receiving timestamps that are synchronized within (40ns? seems
| high, see below) isn't that mind-blowing. If you have
| synchronized clocks and a mechanism that records timestamps
| from various locations with those clocks when you get a voltage
| spike on an antenna, you can triangulate lightning strikes to
| within several hundred feet - from practically anywhere in the
| hemisphere (blitzortung.org).
|
| But i like pointing out that it was the relativistic part that
| was impressive, for sure.
|
| 40ns seems high since you can have an "error" after many hours
| of receiving of less than 10ns, and on a good, clear day, you
| can get to within 1ns, on cheap hardware. My GPS drift is 10
| feet over a week, gradually getting smaller. If i put my good
| receiver in the center of my kitchen, the points converge to
| within the confines of the walls within 48 hours.
|
| However this may just be error correction, and the satellite
| clocks may be inaccurate to 40ns, i am unsure.
| wiz21c wrote:
| Computers. Franklin had none of them and if he'd see ours, he'd
| had is mind blown.
| pushcx wrote:
| I think this post is right that Franklin would've been impressed
| by GPS. The author doesn't call it out, but the Longitude Problem
| was a significant area of scientific and engineering inquiry in
| Franklin's lifetime, with special focus on the difficulty of
| doing so at sea. I haven't looked into it, but given his research
| mapping the Gulf Stream it seems likely he spent time on the
| problem himself.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_longitude
| mckn1ght wrote:
| If only Ben Franklin had access to https://ciechanow.ski/gps/,
| he could've invented GPS to solve it!
| genewitch wrote:
| this reminds me of that site linked here last year that
| explained and diagrammed the inner workings of a wristwatch.
| I used singlefile to save the page, as i do with any page
| that impresses me (or is noteworthy or newsworthy or needs to
| be saved as proof, etc)
| mckn1ght wrote:
| Would that be this one? https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-
| watch/
|
| I'd love to know that those pages are offline-archivable!
| genewitch wrote:
| singlefile does not archive the animated parts,
| unfortunately. At least not by default.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| You also need to take into account what isn't there: How do you
| think Franklin would take it that we went to every single corner
| of the earth and killed Smallpox dead?
|
| Like every tiny hamlet in India?
|
| In fact, let him by the grave yard and note the ages of the dead.
| verisimi wrote:
| > An obvious winner, something sure to blow Franklin's mind is
| "yeah, we've sent people to the Moon to see what it was like,
| they left scientific instruments there and then they came back
| with rocks and stuff." But that's no everyday thing, it blew
| everyone's mind when it happened and it still does. Some things I
| tell Franklin make him goggle and say "We did what?" and I shrug
| modestly and say yeah, it's pretty impressive, isn't it.
|
| I hate this sort of writing - 'WE did this or that', 'shrugging
| modestly'. It has this arrogance about it. Pride for being part
| of something that the individual had _nothing_ to do with. It
| reminds me of the kid at school that joins the winning team to
| get a medal, but can 't even play the game and only gets in the
| way.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| It's more like a kid who is really proud that the current
| champion at their sport was an alumni of the same school. It's
| inspiring without doing any harm.
|
| Perhaps you're being too bitter about life if you think that
| the only things people are allowed to feel a connection to are
| the things they've personally played a role in.
|
| In this specific example, considering that most of us are under
| 50 and thus weren't even alive to be able to participate, and
| thus can only see it as part of our collective history as a
| species.
| beginning_end wrote:
| There's so much cool stuff these days, like interstellar iron:
| https://physicsworld.com/a/antarctic-snow-yields-interstella...
| fooblaster wrote:
| Don't forget about our terrible marvels. We have a red button in
| Washington and if we press it, within 15 minutes we can turn half
| of the cities on the planet into a burning hellscape.
| pfdietz wrote:
| There's a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal about the fantasy of
| explaining current knowledge to leading lights of the past, but I
| can't find the link. Anyone?
| saintamh wrote:
| This one?
|
| https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3106#comic
| pfdietz wrote:
| Yes, that one. Thanks!
| fritzo wrote:
| Ribosomes. People are filled with 10^20 little printing presses
| whose typeface contains four letters, and whose newspapers
| conduct microscopic commerce. All of life is based on ribosomes.
| wwarner wrote:
| We can feel superior to the past, but by the same logic, how will
| the past judge us? I suppose it depends on what problems we
| manage to solve in the future; i.e. the future will have a lot of
| the same problems we have today, but which ones?
| the_af wrote:
| A related thought-exercise I sometimes engage in, inspired by
| Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" is
| this:
|
| Ok, so I have a university education and know lots about
| computers. If I traveled back to the Middle Ages -- actually,
| make it the (inaccurately named) Dark Ages or even more ancient
| times, say the Roman Republic -- how much of my modern day
| knowledge would I be able to use to impress the natives?
|
| The telephone? Nope. I cannot even explain how the telegraph
| works.
|
| Electricity? Sort of. But how would I use it?
|
| Hm... computers are completely out of the question, I wouldn't be
| able to explain how they differ from an abacus or why they are so
| novel.
|
| TV? Not without an example.
|
| The... um, steam machine? Look, I cannot really make anything
| with my hands, so I understand the principle but wouldn't be able
| to replicate it.
|
| The... um... the printing press maybe?
|
| Or tell them to wash their hands thoroughly before/after touching
| an open wound?
|
| In conclusion: I suck.
| ghaff wrote:
| Assuming someone would take your word as gospel your amateur
| medical knowledge is probably worth more than most of your
| knowledge of engineering which just requires too much of a tech
| tree.
|
| Maybe if you're a gunsmith on the side or something.
| marssaxman wrote:
| You may enjoy the novel "Lest Darkness Fall" by L. Sprague de
| Camp, who explored this idea back in 1939.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| You could calculate stuff, just by using arabic numerals rather
| than roman. You could calculate even more stuff with calculus.
| Between those two, you could solve lots of impressive problems.
| (Again, though, they'd have to trust you, because they wouldn't
| understand the answers at all.)
| bandyaboot wrote:
| "That's all really amazing, but I'm having trouble with the thing
| you said about how despite all of this half the country thinks
| things are terrible?"
|
| "Yeah, but get this, the half that thinks things are terrible
| regularly flips and vice-versa."
|
| "Really? What's changing so drastically?"
|
| "Nothing. Let's talk about microchips."
| inasio wrote:
| Nice article! I used to have a similar "friend" I liked to chat
| with and impress him with our modern marvels, not quite Benjamin
| Franklin though, I read a ton of pirate books and this particular
| Malaysian gentleman was pretty impressed by what modern artillery
| could do, and lately about those insanely fast hydrofoil
| sailboats/kitesurfs/windsurfs
| asdfman123 wrote:
| I hate to play the pessimist here, but I wish we could balance
| these amazing technological advances with the wisdom on how to
| use them.
|
| Phones are awesome to look up information or video chat family
| members on another part of the planet. But staring at them for
| emotional regulation while avoiding real people around you is a
| mistake.
|
| I wonder how we're going to solve this problem culturally. I'm
| trying to change my own habits, but it's hard.
| pyrale wrote:
| > I hate to play the pessimist here, but I wish we could
| balance these amazing technological advances with the wisdom on
| how to use them.
|
| This article left me with the same feeling. Technology advances
| so fast we're simply unable to collectively process the power
| we have. We're the equivalent of a toddler finding daddy's gun.
| aftbit wrote:
| Or this quote from Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars:
|
| "We're like dwarves in a waldo[.] One of those really big
| waldo excavators. We're inside it and supposed to be moving a
| mountain, and instead of using the waldo capabilities we're
| leaning out of a window and digging with teaspoons. And
| complimenting each other on the way we're taking advantage of
| the height."
|
| We don't even realize what is possible with our current
| technology.
| nicklecompte wrote:
| Minor nitpick:
|
| > A past what-the-fuck was that we know exactly how many cells
| there are (959) in a particular little worm, C. elegans, and how
| each of those cells arises from the division of previous cells,
| as the grows from a fertilized egg, and we know what each cell
| does and how they are connected, and we know that 302 of those
| cells are nerve cells, and how the nerve cells are connected
| together. (There are 6,720 connections.)
|
| We have no clue what most C elegans neurons actually do, we only
| know how they are connected. The behavior of most individual C
| elegans neurons (and by extension the brain) is basically a
| mystery, and it might take a few decades of experimental advances
| to figure it out.
|
| Not to downplay the coolness of this. But a lot of people seem to
| think "we know the C elegans connectome" means "we know how the C
| elegans brain works." In fact it tells us very little about the
| brain - an analogy I like is that it's akin to understanding a
| complex circuit purely by wires and solder, without knowing if
| you're connecting to a capacitor, an inductor, etc. The
| information is necessary but far from sufficient.
| afpx wrote:
| "What I cannot create, I do not understand." - Richard Feynman
| corytheboyd wrote:
| I'd like to imagine explaining e-sports to a ye olde person.
| Alright so we invented computers, cool I guess, but then we made
| video games, which are like movies you get to drive yourself with
| a human interface device (we just call it a controller). We then
| developed competitive skill based games over time, and the
| ability for many humans to play at the same time in the same
| video game world. Then we created leagues and tournaments, to the
| point where it's a serious career.
|
| We love fantasizing about what future sports would look like in
| sci-fi, but... we kinda already have them now! Way more
| interesting than "football... but in space!" Fun to think about,
| loved this article :)
| sanderjd wrote:
| > _The Internet? Well, again yes, but no. The complicated
| engineering details are complicated engineering, but again the
| basic idea is easily within the reach of the 18th century and is
| not all that astounding._
|
| I get that this is a set-up to the _more_ astounding inventions
| discussed further on, but I think this one is a stretch. I buy
| the paragraph as a description for why telegraphs would not have
| been astounding, but I think there are a few step-changes from
| there to the global broadband packet-switched internet that
| exists today. I don 't think this is the same "basic idea" as
| telegraphs.
| credit_guy wrote:
| That's nothing.
|
| The thing Benjamin Franklin would have marveled at is how many
| things we refuse to do.
|
| If you told Franklin that within 9 months of us getting hit by a
| new virus we would start mass-producing a vaccine, he would be
| impressed, but not all that much. But if you told him hundreds of
| millions of people refused to take the vaccine, he'd then be
| truly astonished.
|
| If you told Franklin that only 65 years after first flying an
| airplane we landed humans on the Moon, he would give an
| appreciative nod. If you told him we built and tested a thermal
| nuclear rocket engine and it was working better than one could
| hope, and then we completely shelved the project, he will admit
| that his brain is too small to comprehend that.
|
| Make sure you do not mention GMOs to Ben Franklin.
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