SunlitZelkova

June 17

It was Saturday, but I rode the train to Seattle and back to Portland on a day trip.

And near the Tacoma Dome, I saw a very peculiar piece of graffiti on a distant railway bridge (one used for freight).

RIP SERGEI PAVLOVICH FLY HIGH

As expected of such an economically STEM focused region Even the delinquents know about space history.

Spoiler

Ironically I also ran into some leftist activists on that day, calling for revolution. Seattle also has a Lenin statue. There was also a poster for a “Gathering of Post-Soviet Queer Jews,” and there was a seemingly plastered shut pirozhki shop downtown.

They say the reason the PNW has so many post-Soviet immigrants is because the climate is similar, but when I occasionally see the weather in Moscow on my phone it’s hard to find a parallel, especially in winter. My mom’s ex-boyfriend did say the weather in the Baltic states is similar though.

So as I’m typing this I had a thought. Is there ever an instance when one kid is exposed to a certain subject in childhood and goes into the exact opposite field as an adult, while another child goes vice versa?

The three years I was in Bellevue were very formative, and it’s where I got interested in aviation. Yet I’m most certainly gonna end up in humanities.

Although, my case doesn’t count probably, because life taking a bad turn and a mental disorder prevented me from ever being to study hard in math and science.

June 17

On 6/15/2024 at 1:05 AM, DDE said:

It would be very interesting to find out when this change took place, and why.

I also wonder if it actually happened at all. The three things shown in that picture, Legos, what looks like a mobile suit type plastic model, and an action figure, are questionable as toys. Lego could pass as an artistic form of plastic model (indeed when I restarted buying Lego Star Wars, initially I justified it due to a “lack of plastic models about Star Wars” because I was still felt I needed to be publicly beholden to the popular complex that Legos are for kids), while plastic models are made by people of all ages and the action figures adults often buy are so detailed and expensive it’s questionable if they are toys or just premade models.

In addition, even if the product is also played with by children, it doesn’t mean adults can’t do it too. No one talks about the NBA as “adults playing a schoolyard pastime and people cheering them like little kids at an afterschool match.”

I’d also be interested if there is any parallel between the rise of toy purchases from adults and the “de-nerdification”/main-streamization of comic book stories. I first heard of that particular phenomena in regards to the popularity of the MCU but maybe it goes as far back as the Nolan Batman trilogy.

June 13

I had a moral quagmire today about whether it's okay for me to have fun playing war themed video games. It was probably brought on by the last two weeks of intense study of modern day orders of battle and potential conflicts. Topped off with scrolling the "For You" section of Twitter for the first time.

My conclusion is this: it's terrible, but hey, there are worse vices. Ones that physically harm you or even others. If it gives you dopamine every now and then *shrug*

And here's another thing: I know so much more about history and politics now than I did before getting into war themed play (starting with little paper planes I made and leading to video games). Stuff about those two subjects that make me a far more informed person than I might have been had I not gotten into that kind of play. I think as much as this knowledge is terrible, I'm better off having it than not. I can make much more informed decisions in society and be more aware of what's going on in the world.

So I'm going to continue playing war themed video games, despite often feeling awful about turning the end of the lives of thousands of men and women (whether real or hypothetical/fictional) into entertainment.

June 9

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

They replace real human world with cadavers.

I was reading a book about psychology and the media and it talked about how if you sell something as being real, it can become real in the minds of those who see the video/movie/show/whatever.

I think we often forget that history is just a story and TV shows are just made up.

So people in countries that have fortunate winds upon them think the road their ancestors took to get there is the only way to keep things good, lose creativity, end up basically slamming their head into a wall over and over again when confronted with a new problem, and of course it doesn't work and the society in question collapses. Story becomes reality (law) and we lose creativity when it comes to problem solving.

People see TV shows and think that what is depicted on TV is the only way to go about life. So people set unrealistically high expectations for relationships and can't keep up with the stress of... acting (wink wink)... in a certain way and eventually break up or divorce, or set high expectations for their own life (wanting daring adventures on yachts and snowmobiles, flings with pretty people, high physical fitness, eat delicious food, have satisfying job, etc.) and when it doesn't turn out that way they just become depressed and start making bad decisions.

Looking at the mess of the world makes me think when it comes to the humanities, looking back on past ideas has more negative effects than positive ones. I wish people could forget about whatever happened in the past, identify the problems now, and make new solutions for them from a clean slate, without the sort of chains or binders that seem to shape people's behavior. And I wish people would look at TV shows, movies, advertising, and even music and go "okay, cool" and then ignore it and make their own decisions about what their values are and what they want to do in life.

Unfortunately my wishes may not be realistic as learning from the prior generation may be the very way humans learn to live in the world, survive, and thrive. So every generation keeps making mistakes, and so does the next one, and then the next one, forever until the universe winks out of existence or the last malnourished human dies in 2978 or whenever humanity goes extinct.

Oh, that actually leads me to an interesting question: what if human-level intelligence is a negative trait in a species? Humans often make fun of dinosaurs for lacking intelligence and thus being unable to prevent their extinction, but they lived for 135 million years and humans have been around for like 2-5 million tops. We are literally in the middle of a major extinction event we caused and we might not escape it. I guess we can't say for sure until the day all humans actually cease to exist.

June 7

My dad and I were talking about how he wants to buy an Insta360 (basically a GoPro but better) for when he rides his motorcycle, and then when I opened my phone 30 minutes later I was bombarded by Insta360 ads on Instagram, specifically for use with motorcycles... despite never having seen such an ad before and never searching for motorcycle related topics.

There's definitely a privacy issue with phones and it has nothing to do with whether the apps come from the US or China. This century liquides me off sometimes.

June 2

3 hours ago, PakledHostage said:

Looking for some validation here: I was given some free tickets to a sports game today so I took my son. It's not something that I would normally be interested in and I haven't done it very often in my handful of decades, but I found the tribalism odd and the spectacle rather... boring. I'd much rather watch a rocket launch (I once flew to Florida just to see a shuttle launch). Is something wrong with me? What don't I get that these thousands of others seem to?

No, but I think you are oversimplifying what it is. Each team spends years training to perfect what they do and it is, IMO, an art.

That said, I don't know to what extent the average sports spectator appreciates this. Intense team rivalries likely originate in how many modern team sports were invented at Victorian schools, and later the advent of the railway allowed schools to reach and compete with each other more easily. So in that sense it originates in institutional competition. Capitalism also influences it to a great degree as team names become brands, and there is a competition to increase notoriety and prestige by winning more competitions. Of course, this was perhaps prevalent in the ancient times as well, as Greek Olympians' achievements were used as political capital by the different city-states.

Exhilaration from watching sports can either come from enjoyment of the art of the game or enjoyment of one team bidding to dominate over another. A person doesn't like every single form of art on the Earth and not everyone enjoys cheering on the metaphorical mounting of one entity by another. So I'd say there is nothing wrong with you. Being in the minority is not a negative attribute.

Of course, humans are social animals, and therefore if they feel they aren't properly engaging with other humans, they will instinctively doubt themselves to try and get on the "correct" course, because fitting in is (was) necessary for survival. So your feelings can't be helped.

June 1

Save it for retirement.

EDIT- okay, set aside some for continually upgrading my computer as necessary, but then save the rest for retirement.

June 1

Ah, the romance of interwar aviation!

May 29

On 5/28/2024 at 10:17 AM, BA-Forums said:

I have a Mars Transfer Vehicle, any name ideas?

The Beagle.

May 29

@ColdJ I agree with all the points in your response. Just one thing though.

8 hours ago, ColdJ said:

Yes it is. The belief is that money in abundance will allow you to get the things that will make you happy. In reallity, the ability to do what you want without others constantly blocking you is what makes us happy. Freedom to be as you want to be, to think as you want to think. There is just so much regulation these days that we see money as a way to buy ourselves out. I think most on this forum would love to be able to build a real rocket and go to space. Half is having the knowhow and materials to make it. The other half is paying all the agencies that have been setup to regulate it. It isn't the money that makes you happy, it is the getting to launch your rocket that makes you happy. I would love to grab a chair and some weather balloons, then go for a float. Assuming I didn't float so high as to freeze to death, it would be the regulatory departments that would either stop me or bring me down. People who decide to be Monks and live a simple life without wealth are happy. Tribes that existed without money before the modern world found them, were happy.

I think this is subjective. There are wealthy people who are happy are people who lack material possessions that are happy, and wealthy people who are depressed and people who lack material possessions who are depressed.

That said, I think the key thing is allowing everyone to have happiness. Amassing wealth involves keeping it away from others, so regardless of whether the wealthy person is happy or not, theoretically, I’d say people on average would be more happy if we dropped notions of mine and thine and worked together.

Emphasis on theoretically because realistically I think there’s all those very hard behavioral issues I mentioned earlier preventing humans from becoming cooperative and altruistic enough to realize such a society.

May 26

5 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Except it was not the Europeans who drove San off their original land, it was other Africans before European colonization, farmers and herders displaced them. European then repeated the process again against Africans to some degree.

Thanks for the correction, I wasn't aware of that. I think my point still stands that there are other factors in why modern hunter-gatherers aren't seen engaging with big predators often, yet those cultural traits I mentioned still existed even when they did.

5 hours ago, magnemoe said:

its very likely say ice age hunter gatherer was much less nomadic than more modern ones like San who are restricted to areas not suited for farming.
And its population density dependent after all the diseases in America killed off most of the population after Europeans arrived many people in North America switched to hunter gatherers as it was room for it and its less work.
Farming in America was also more an pain because no good draft animals and less efficient crops than Eurasia.

People in North America were practicing hunting/gathering long before Europeans arrived. We know this from their oral histories.

Farming occurred to some degree with crops like maize. But many chose just to hunt and gather. We know they did try to form a city at one point now known as Cahokia, but it was then abandoned. This makes me think there was a conscious decision not to farm too much or live in large groupings, making the nature of how societies form a cultural factor rather than one defined by material conditions.

I guess we could say culture is defined by material conditions, but that makes me wonder why places like Nebelivka didn't develop into kingdoms/empires with social hierarchy, because Europe ostensibly had the conditions to support the maintenance and growth of the city indefinitely.

May 26

20 hours ago, ColdJ said:

You are getting confused by modern Hunter Gatherers. We are talking thousands of years BCE. Not only were there the dangers of other predators hunting the tribes for food but also you needed to move with the seasons, both due to weather and making sure you didn't completely drain the available food resources in a particular area. While you were encamped in one locale then other locales had time to replenish animals and plants. The tribes did not plant to encourage growth, but rather left an area so that it could recover. Same with animals, hunt enough to keep you fed but don't wipe out the population, so they have a chance to breed more. Modern populations are so huge that it is very rare that other animals are a real threat. It is other humans that generally cause humans to get killed by other than natural causes.

The San people are at least 20,000 years old. Their historical range spans much of southern Africa, where numerous predators live. The reason we don't really see them battling lions and leopards is likely because they were forced off their land by European colonial officials.

I'm pretty sure it's incorrect that prehistoric people deliberately left animal populations to recover. After all, in the Americas they hunted large mammals like mastodons and giant sloths to extinction. That said, I don't have direct evidence to back it up.

20 hours ago, ColdJ said:

The invention of farming and animal husbandry changed that. Now you could settle in one location and build more permanent structures. More permanent structures gave you more protection from predators and the elements. More protection allowed you to produce more children, more children led to more excess children who were not likely to be needed or likely to get things passed down, who were sent off to fend for themselves. Some started new communities but others chose to steal rather than work, this led to groupings of these sort for their own protection, which led to the forming of gangs, who openly attacked and took from those who could not defend themselves. Gangs got bigger and formed the equivalent of Warlord run armies who would move about attacking settlements etc. Let this all grow and playout over time and eventually you get Emperors and kings who kept power by passing down to their own offspring. Layer builds upon layer. Of course the whole is far more complex and doesn't even touch on the creation of new professions that led to new discoveries etc.

Hmm, the only thing I question about this is why empires didn't arise in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, when the aforementioned Tualatin Kalapuya people who used to live where I now am lived seasonally in (albeit) permanent structures made of cedar wood. Further up north of course the tribes in Washington had their longhouses.

Tribes in both Oregon and Washington would catch salmon, process it, and then store it, but due to their culture of providing basic needs for each other, theft was not as common as in Europe.

On the other hand, fishing and smoking or drying salmon was a labor intensive process. But the chiefs in Washington and British Columbia had no real political power over the wider populace, because the average person understood that another person had no real right or ability to order them around. They did not possess an army or police force and thus couldn't force people that way either. What the chiefs were able to convince others to do was go out and capture slaves to do the processing and fishing for the tribe.

However, the chief was not a king or emperor in the same way as seen in Europe. An off hand, off the top of my head speculation would be that European and Middle Eastern religions often resulted in strongmen being able to claim they derived their power from god, whereas such ideas were rare in North America (at least what became Canada and the US).

Which is to say that...

20 hours ago, ColdJ said:

I agree. Modern lives are harder but all the hardships are artificially created by other humans and their complex systems built around gaining wealth, because we have been convinced that being wealthy makes you happy. Which is a fantasy.

I was talking about way back when it started, not the complex mess we have developed into now.

All the rest you wrote makes my argument for me on when I said are we going to end up as Eloi.

Humans as a vast population are basically sheep, happy to be led into ways of thought and doing rather than using their natural ability to question and choose for themselves. Children aren't born hating others based on looks, countries or ideologies. They are taught and indoctrinated before they are old enough to think for themselves. A minority manage to shake off this brain washing for themselves, but the majority do not. Any conflicts going on in the world today are due to this happening.

Imagine if every single difference of opinion led to someone trying to kill the other so that their way of thinking was the only one left.

...so yeah, I think there is a sort of tyranny of history and empire that dooms us as I said in the post before this. But I'm replying just to clarify I personally believe it is cultural rather than decided by material conditions.

I'm sure there's arguments that point to the latter though too.

19 hours ago, DDE said:

@SunlitZelkova, anthropology is probably irreversibly tainted by the fact that too many anthorpologists project not just their biases, but also their political preferences onto their studies. Cases of entire tribes being invented wholecloth to buttress a point are not uncommon.

Because of that, I prefer not to use those comparisons.

I agree, but I think it not just invalidates attempts to look at history in a new way, but also ways of looking at history that are biased, but so embedded in daily life and culture we might not realize they were.

So really we can just make it up. Then it comes down to whether humans have the actual power to make choices or are dominated by limitations upon their cognitive capability and/or material factors (being limited by instinct). That biological/psychological question I mentioned.

I know the rest of your reply wasn't meant for me but I thought I'd comment.

19 hours ago, DDE said:

On the contrary, familiarity breeds contempt like you wouldn't believe.

Another thing I'd mention is how vicious children can be toward living things. I recall hanging out with my mom while she babysat two three year olds one day, and we found a caterpillar while we were out on a walk. I was looking at it in wonder and was horrified when one of them crushed it, while smiling and laughing. That memory left a strong impression on me.

19 hours ago, DDE said:

Also, your agency-denying model inevitably arrives to the conclusion that the world can only be saved by a good shepherd who'd guide these sheeple to the correct values. Never a good plan...

I feel like this sort of belief is only possible through religious or pseudo-religious belief. Because realistically all of the humans are subject to the cycle of suffering he and I described, so none of them can escape it.

This brings me to a notion of Philip K. Dick's. He believed to defeat the "Empire" is to become it. So even if you overthrow whatever system or individual is causing suffering, due to the limitations of living in this entropic world, you're probably gonna end up doing a lot of the same stuff the old ruler did. He said this both as a critique of nations and religions, and the inability to overcome this problem led to a major existential crisis in his final few years.

The only way the good shepherd theory works within this "agency-denying model" is if this shepherd is somehow more than human (or not human at all).

Which, however, people aren't unlikely to believe, at least from my POV. But I think a good shepherd coming along is just another would be (or future) king/emperor. Whether someone believes there is a good shepherd while adhering to the agency-denying model or not is a test of whether they can mentally step away from the fervor of desire for change at any cost or are simply part of the large group of humans who are "taught and indoctrinated before they are old enough to think for themselves."

Because belief in good shepherds is kind of part of the bad behavior exhibited in human history that he and I are lamenting. It would be quite ironic to end up believing in a new one in the process of wishing the old ones had never come about.

May 25

13 hours ago, LHACK4142 said:

Ads are the bane of the world... they're the whole reason social media listens to you and tries to get you addicted. The ad industry's end goal is basically just mind control I think.

Ads are how people fund stuff. It can't be helped in the way our economy works.

Spying on people to "improve" their ads? That's what bugs me.

May 25

I spy a book about Soviet aviation in the Korean War.

May 25

On 5/23/2024 at 6:34 PM, Kerbalsaurus said:

Bruvell Central Station, the main hub of all rail activity in Northwestern Pennsylvania! The main transport companies that operate here are Amtrak and Bruvell Regional Transport, and is a connection point between the Northeast corridor, Pittsburg, and Ohio. It's mainly inspired by 30th Street Station (Philadelphia), but also takes a bit of inspiration from Newark Penn and New York Penn. As you can see, this drawing's still a WIP.

I think this is an ugly train station but it matches the vibe of your city! Like in a good way, because a dirty city has a beauty of its own.

I'm biased though because I live in Portland and once near Seattle, blessed with the gorgeous Union Station and King Street Station.

Your project is really cool. And thanks for that info about how radio stations are named, I had no idea.

EDIT- And I don't mean your drawing is ugly, I mean the source material is. The drawing is really good. Not a negative comment directed at you or your choices, just at the IRL architects.

May 25

15 hours ago, ColdJ said:

Not advanced was the "Hunter Gatherers" who survived day to day and had no time to sit back and think of ways to make their lives easier.

This is an inaccurate depiction of hunter gatherers. Whether work or leisure is available is a cultural aspect, not defined by material conditions. The San and Hadza peoples in Africa value leisure time and thus choose to maintain their hunter gatherer lifestyle over agriculture, which they deem as involving too much work. A man from the latter ethnic group once said "Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?" On the other hand, in one Northern California tribe (which I unfortunately forget the name of ) work was valued and those who lazed around all day were ostracized from society.

15 hours ago, ColdJ said:

Population control was built in and nobody really had thoughts of building armies and trying to invade and control large areas of land.

With the introduction of farming, chemical sciences, physics etc. Human's lives grew easier but also fostered those who always wanted more than they had. And so began armed conflicts built around wanting to control more land both for farming and for the creation of villages, then fortified towns/castles etc and then each layer of advancement that built on the last up to today and just a quick look at world news will give you an idea of how that is going.

I'd argue human lives are harder and they are less free. People live in fear of an overlord, whether it be the grocery store controlling prices of food, the boss deciding your paycheck, or the manager assigning your work hours. Far away kings who know little of what it's like to be a normal working person in the present day and age make decisions without consultation of the masses, claiming to represent them simply because they were elected.

There is new evidence poking holes in the narrative that we went in a straight line from hunting-gathering to villages and then cities and states. Sites like Nebelivka in Ukraine or Cahokia in the US show people have lived in cities and then abandoned them without reestablishing cities again for centuries (or virtually never again in the case of Native Americans). The straight line idea mainly comes from European/Caucasian anthropologists trying to force the path of their history onto indigenous cultures to somehow justify the violence wrought on the indigenous peoples.

I don't think hunter-gatherer societies lived in idyllic peace either. War is just an extension of human squabbles. Except the squabble exists between a very small group of (usually) men, and unfortunately, everyone else seems to have forgotten how to say "No" when that small group of men tries to force them to do something or think a certain way. Contrast this with the Wendat in the 1700s, who required a completely unanimous decision from the entire community to go to war. A point I raise to show that while war may occur often, it is not a product of kings and emperors alone.

(I'm gonna go on a tangent here)

I like to call human civilization in the present day "the Empire" because in my opinion not much has changed since the days of the Roman Empire. The provinces fight civil wars, a select few run the state, many people are enslaved (in one form or another) by one institution or another, and spectacles are used to distract people from major issues in their daily lives.

In other words, (IMO), the world we live in is still one of kings and emperors, just with better bullets so to speak. Because of that, I don't believe "one layer has built on top of another" and that the systems of control we live under are more simple than at first glance. Therefore, the opportunity to change the world for the better exists right now. It is not hidden or locked away by time or technology or the word salad of political ideas that exist.

So rather than wondering if we are doomed because of the way our society works or the tyranny of history, I believe whether we are doomed or not hinges on the ability of humans to be creative and think outside the box. That's a biological (neurological) and psychological issue, not one of politics or history.

And ironically, while mainstream historians and anthropologists often like to cast prehistoric humans as being beholden to environmental factors, I'd say that's more the case now than then, because people were free to live completely on their own, get their own food, and not do what anyone told them to back then, but nowadays people are (IMO FYI, as I say it quite dramatically) enslaved to many things, whether it be being reliant on farmers for their food, placing the needs of their friend group over their self to the point of abandoning individuality, or obeying the law or the orders of those who make the law to the point of death.

But here's the thing- I'm not saying anarchy would be better. Both anarchic hunting/gathering and life in imperial cities have their own issues. I think people should just be free to choose what they want to do. It may sound like I'm arguing collective leadership or hunting/gathering would make the world a better place, but that's not my intention. The key is choice. Being free to build a village with people you like in your own way, or free to live on your own. It's up to the individual. Together with a culture based on mutual respect for autonomy and care for basic needs, that would foster much more creativity and cooperation than anything else, IMO.

The only reason we think there are limits on what we can do as a species is because we were born into societies that place limits on what we can do as individuals. Humans consciously created the world they live in, and they can take it apart and rebuild it how they want.

Unless they are not conscious, of course, which is a question I've grappled with a lot. Because as much as I have hope in theory, in practice I often feel like humans are unthinking machines who have all these thoughts and ability to sense things in the universe but aren't actually capable of doing anything outside of their basic instincts, and will thus be destroyed because acting on the needs of the species as a whole is not part of their instinct- only acting on behalf of the offspring or individual. I actually wrote a short story recently in which the human education system has been so dumbed down over the centuries that the AI system overseeing society has become smarter than them, but the AI system itself is bound by part of its programming to a certain behavior, but despite knowing it is bound does not remember who did it and cannot undo it. It can only wonder, just as that is all the humans can do.

This actually comes back to those "zombie civilizations" I mentioned in my shower thought about the vulnerability of science. Anthropology has the ability to shed light on what human behavior can really be characterized as and what events in history shaped the world we live in, but the average citizen and the average holder-of-power probably has little sophisticated conception of this enormous topic beyond that simplistic Hobbesian "we all fought each other and eventually a king came along and made us bear each other in order to advance civilization." People don't really know why things are the way they are now, and they don't really have an understanding of how culture shapes perspectives and values. Thus they throw their hands up and say "it's always been this way" or "this is inevitable" when it really isn't. But because of the pressures of day to day life, they can't really afford time to sit down and think about those questions, let alone actually let them influence how they live*.

Thus we are stuck inheriting problems and finding new ones caused by stones left unturned by the past generation, which then cause us to neglect the future, in turn causing problems for the next generation, in turn causing them to neglect the future, and so on and so on. And "it's always been and will always be this way" because some centuries old scientists, who were really just looking at history with bias and limited tools, told us that so that they could make their society feel better about crushing the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in a faraway "new" land.

I'd almost say the science is what doomed us into this trap, despite offering salvation. History used to come in the form of myths and stories, which can be open to interpretation and rejected easily. If history becomes a science, that buzzword makes one interpretation of it the law of the land. It's very hard to question science after all.

On that note I'm going to end the tangent. Theoretically we have a road to salvation, but realistically we might be doomed. That's my opinion.

*The heavy influence of my single college anthropology class really shows on me here. To be clear, I'm not saying we have the answers now, I'm just saying it's an open question.

May 23

7 hours ago, ColdJ said:

If more advanced beings hadn't visited thousands of years ago (human populations called them Gods) and put humans on the path to more advanced practices, would we and the planet actually be better off?

I think the issue here is characterizing what constitutes "advanced." Is a 1300s Tualatin Kalapuya man who lives until 40 but is happy and roams free and contributes to the community throughout his life more "advanced" than the 80 year old from 2024 who has been on anti-depressants half his life and sits in a retirement home watching TV?

The problem is there are people well off in every era of history and people worse off. It's hard to gauge what really constitutes more advanced or not if every generation has its own problems.

I'm unaware of the extent to which early scientific innovations were driven by religious people, although I can list examples (but they may be anecdotal). Newton and Copernicus were Christians, Pythagoras and his followers were Pythagoreans. Tsiolkovsky believed in ethereal beings that transferred knowledge to humans, while a lot of the impetus for the Space Race came from communism vs. capitalism, which entailed atheism vs. religion in the eyes of the American politicians who funded NASA. Perhaps these achievements wouldn't have happened without the religious backgrounds involved (although IMO, the type of "religiousness" present in the four I namedropped is more akin to some sort of spiritualism: being touched by mystical curiosity almost constantly throughout daily life, than the average "religiousness": go to the place of worship once every week but otherwise not think about it too much).

Now of course there are atheists and agnostics who make discoveries too. I think I would guess that the answer to the question "was religion required to get science going" is more likely to be revealed by statistical analysis as being that there is no apparent prerequisite of either atheism or religiosity to be capable of making scientific discoveries. If that is the case I would say that the current world we live in was not precipitated by tales of gods but would look like this either way.

I also think there is a degree of "temporal entrapment" one has to examine when asking that question. People may appear to be worse off in all sorts of ways, but what about 200 or 400 years from now? If it's all peachy, won't that make the problems we sometimes wish never got brought up (like nuclear weapons and the Internet) worth it?

4 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Almost any Soviet/Russian family had its kitchen-garden, some were feeding from it in 1990s.

Useful info about local agriculture is in magazines, and basically occupies from zero to a copybook (to be a local professor of agronomy).

Even when I hate doing agriculture myself (except in Minecraft), I have visual memories about how it was organized at several places of our family.

Not a rocket science.

I was gonna say "Russia is ahead of the US in that regard" but it seems 1 in 3 households grow their own produce in the US. I guess it just wasn't/isn't that popular in the two communities I've lived in (one cookie cutter neighborhood full of Intel employees, one an upscale neighborhood in the shadow of Microsoft HQ with a lot of rich, old retirees).

May 23

So TIL about Edgar Mitchell’s interest in consciousness studies, quantum theory, and… UFOs.

It really has me wondering if science can truly be called “science” or if it is just an extension of human reasoning and senses, which, perhaps inevitably, will lead to non-impartial interpretations of observations, perhaps leading to new systems of belief. And systems of belief are vulnerable to abuse, and thus science may end up destroying itself.

The way Mitchell talks of the universe being made out of information is jarringly similar to Philip K. Dick’s Gnostic inspired ruminations, in which he arrived at the same conclusion independently, without scientific observation, after having a mystical experience in 1974.

Mitchell claims all six lunar module pilots had the same mystical experience he did at some point during their flight, and were changed by it in their own unique way. It makes me wonder what sorts of wild ideas might be birthed from more regular flights to the Moon in the coming years, especially due to the heavy influence of pop culture involving aliens and mystical forces (like the sorcerers in Doctor Strange) compared to the types of media Mitchell and his fellow Apollo astronauts consumed as kids.

Everybody knew lightning existed, just one day someone came along and claimed it came from Zeus’ fingers.

Charles Fort was on to something when he felt that science was just as vulnerable to dogmas as systems of belief, IMO. Quantum physicists may be on the forefront of creative theorization right now, but will they be in 1000 or 2000 years? I’d hate to see a time come when people are burned at the stake for daring to question the sacredness of the Quantum One.

Ironically I think the solution to this is to let people come to their own conclusions. It’s okay to think the universe is cold and unthinking or that intelligent chi/ki surrounds us in the form of the energies that make up the universe. But let people decide that for themselves.

Mitchell is wrong, when in the NASA oral history in which he is interviewed he states that science needs to help craft “a new story” to help “have a better value system that’s in tune with the processes of the universe.”

Arthur C. Clarke’s quote… “Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic,” has some disturbing consequences. If one day all of the problems are solved, and ideas become more and more complex, and sufficient time passes that the early discoveries become almost mythical in nature, that history will be easily distortable. Just look at how more or less… human… humans of 10000 years ago were recast as dumb savages by Thomas Hobbes.

I guess what I’m saying is… humans gradually learned through experimentation how to cultivate crops. But the memory of exactly when a certain group first did it was so distant no one remembered. So it was mythologized. The lesson of agriculture was given by gods. Today, very few people know how to grow food on a scale necessary to sustain a decent population. It’s a relatively rare art.

So what if we forget who the Wright Brothers were, and who Einstein was, and we attribute these successes to supernatural forces. Not in the same way the first farmers were forgotten and replaced by gods, but rather by turning them into “supermen” and assuming they had “help” from… oh, I don’t know, Martians. That idea already exists now.

But then the names of the people get less important. Because all technology was given by the Martians, so it doesn’t matter what the humans’ names were. Eventually they are then forgotten.

And then we have a sort of zombie civilization, which doesn’t remember where it came from and likely doesn’t have much of an idea of where it wants to go- not unlike how the majority of people in the 21st century are focused on the present rather than future.

Maybe people aren’t interested in making new things because they’re infatuated with existing technology. Or maybe those who claim to have their own ideas without the help of Martians are accused of blasphemy and burned at the stake.

Science becomes a lost art, practiced by a few or none at all. Doctors become indistinguishable from medicine men. Quantum physicists become virtually identical to shamans.

People start talking of “bad” and “good” magic. There are good sorcerers and evil sorcerers. To some extent this conflict already exists in the form of debate on ethical and unethical science experiments.

Science and philosophy complement each other in some ways, but trying to integrate them is flawed, IMO. The police and fire department are more effective as independent branches than a single institution.

But I wonder… is science truly unique? The present is the past and also the future. But it’s only the present until it’s history.

Today’s objective truth and facts may be the myths of tomorrow.

I think that’s alright, but I just really wish for people to decide what they think on their own. Not have the meaning of life shoved down their throats through indoctrination into the dogma. It would be a terrible mistake to utilize science to try to answer those sorts of questions.

May 21

19 hours ago, Lisias said:

Breath? Kerbals don't breath!

The Bushnell Turtle, the first submarine - or kinda of.

https://navalhistoria.com/the-turtle-was-the-worlds-first-submarine/

I remember seeing this in a book from my elementary school’s library. Thanks for the dose of nostalgia!

May 19

Today (and yesterday) I attended the 2024 UFO Fest in McMinnville, Oregon. It was my first time going and being around any adults remotely interested in UFOs outside of my family.

There were a number of speaker events. I and my mother attended one with Ryan Graves, Lieutenant USN (ret), and one with Garrett M. Graff, journalist. I chose these two over the others specifically because they are outsiders to the usual Roswell crowd, and represent a neutral ground between denialists and true believers.

Graves' presentation was yesterday, and it was interesting. He runs a non-profit dedicated to gathering UFO/UAP data called Americans For Safe Aerospace. He encountered UAP himself and claims they were commonly seen in the military at least a few years before the 2017 video release.

He shared some interesting data, mainly in that none of the UFOs/UAPs appear to have pilots, only coming in the form of geometric shapes or points of light, sometimes surrounded by what looks like a plasma field, much to the disappointment of some in the audience. The number of military reports his organization collects is actually low due to new reporting procedures, with the next biggest categories being commercial and general aviation. Some are corroborated with ground reports. The details behind some of the sightings are weird, to say the least. His experience with it started during his time with VFA-11 during training off Virginia Beach. They were testing the AN/APG-79 AESA radar upgrade for the F/A-18F and would pick up swarms of odd objects. They thought it was a bug in the system, but continually found targets that weren't supposed to be in the restricted airspace. When they would go to look at them the AIM-9s would detect an IR signature and get a lock, but nothing would appear to be there. Eventually a visual sighting did occur in which a black sphere surrounded by glass buzzed two F-18s within 500 feet.

Idk if anyone remembers, but there have been "UAP" sightings underwater. I always thought that a little silly, and Graves shared what that was, because the incident was registered in his data. Basically a submarine was in the Atlantic and picked up what appeared to be a torpedo moving at 100 knots and tracking them. The captain ordered it to dive, and the target followed them down. The captain actually took it below the safe depth, and the target then approached within 100 yards of the sub before diving further. Graves says he doesn't know whether such incidents are common or not because the submarine community is tight lipped for obvious reasons, and also, he shared that there are operational considerations in why most of the UAP videos come from Navy aircraft rather than Air Force: the Air Force is often actually doing stuff during its missions over the US, while the Navy is simply training.

Graff's presentation was interesting too, but mainly talked about broad concepts of why the UAP is being taken seriously yet again. The gist of it is that after a certain event in 2001, the US became more interested in what was happening in its skies regardless of its affiliation, whereas as the military shrugged once it was obvious the craft weren't Soviet recon vehicles back in the 60s. The other reason he states is that the idea of there being life out there is taken a little more seriously now that we know exoplanets exist.

Neither of these speakers claimed to have definitive answers for what they are, and believed there is not a single answer but many.

Graves simply said he did not have the credentials to ascertain what they are; his mission is to collect data and deal with the stigma around reporting. He did address how Starlink can cause sightings, and described how many "point of light" sightings defy the behavior of a satellite. When asked if the famous video was of a bird (a hypothesis proposed by the members of this forum too), he said he didn't know, but he thought it unlikely due to pilots seeing birds everyday and being unlikely to mistake one for a UAP. He also mentioned that in that specific video the target appeared to come from the east, from the direction of the middle of the Atlantic, while in his experience birds mostly stay around the carrier or near land.

Graff categorized the explanations into four possible categories: Starlink/Venus, experimental drones from the usual suspects*, unknown atmospheric phenomena, and then the "really weird" aliens/interdimensional/time travel whatever. I listed the categories in order of most common to very rare if at all (according to him).

*He cites an alleged incident in which a UAP emerged from the water and then went airborne, which helped the US intelligence community to identify a new Chinese drone. It's another reason why the government is interested again.

While the speakers I listened to were pleasant, the rest of the people were... meh. Between the people soliciting festival attendees for off-topic propaganda purposes or the man who got up to ask Graff a question, only to question him about the "relevancy" of David Icke when it comes to the 2001 event (completely off topic in regard to the presentation, but Graff is an author of an oral history of that event), it's not a crowd I'd like to hang around. Oh, and unfortunately much of the audience (including my mother) were and remain convinced the government is hiding something, despite Graff's attempts to explain at how bad the US government is at keeping secrets (he's been reporting on national security matters for 20 years).

It was fun though. I got a lot of UFO goodies, had some good food and a UFO themed coffee, and attended a parade involving a number of local organizations dressing up as aliens or scifi characters.

I think a person's opinion about UFOs exists on a spectrum. On one end there is Carl Sagan, in the middle there is Jacques Vallee, and at the other end there is Eric Von Daniken (of course outliers in further directions beyond the ends exist too). I like to think I'm firmly in the middle, in that something is happening but it doesn't necessarily fall under the domain of science to investigate. It's more of a psychological and religious phenomena with philosophical implications, IMO. That's why I posted this here and don't plan to mention anything in the Tic-Tac UFO thread in the S&S section. I just don't find it worth discussing in a scientific context.

I think I got lucky in having two normal speakers to choose this time around. The other three were Roswell fanatics. It was a fun event, and I find the topic really interesting, but I don't think I'd attend again unless someone from the outside presents. The work of people like Graves is purported by himself and Graff to be encouraging a more nuanced view of the topic though, so perhaps more like them will be available to visit some day.

P.S. I'm sure some of you are giggling at me, a UFO believer, considering Roswell dudes to be the "insiders" corrupting the topic, and a former USN pilot and a journalist who contributes to big media to be the "outsiders" who can save it with wisdom. For the average UFO fan its no-name trailer park dudes who are the trustworthy outsiders and the government and media that are the swamp trying to keep people in the dark XD

May 13

For anyone who is confused, what he means by “hard” is an image that “goes hard.” “Goes hard” is slang for something cool or epic.

May 13

I watched 2012 for the first time. I found it to be a pretty entertaining movie, which asks some interesting questions about morality when comes to saving the world, albeit perhaps not so original ones. It was refreshing to watch in 2024 when all the movies seem to be about relatively normal life, while the end of the world talk comes from IRL stuff (barring superhero movies which require a perennial doomsday to defeat).

I can’t decide between the oligarch calling an Antonov aircraft Russian or the Chinese Mi-26s airlifting giraffes and other animals as the most funny part.

Interesting to note, while the Chinese do not possess Mi-26s, they do operate a number of Sikorsky S-70s, which are partially depicted by way of Blackhawks with PLA insignia also used by the Chinese in the film.

Given the neutrino “mutation” nonsense in the beginning, I was thoroughly surprised that the arks ended up being ships instead of spaceships. Considering the shipbuilding giant it is today I’d say the premise of building a massive ark for 100,000 people isn’t too far fetched, although doing it in the Himalayas and in total secrecy might be.

I also found it funny that Japan, Russia, and China got stuck on the same boat together. I’m a Japanese person who has an interest in the Russian (well, Soviet) and Chinese militaries. I have seen a loosely similar concept explored in Japan Sinks: 2020, in which many Japanese refugees end up in Russia, Japan Sinks: 2023, in which a good portion of the Japanese population is evacuated to China, and I myself considered exploring the concept with the idea to conduct an amateur study of what kind of resources would be needed to relocate the entire population of Japan to new-built cities in the Russian Far East in the event of either a fantasy Japan sinks scenario or a climate disaster which renders Japanese summers unlivable. The latter is an idea I did not pursue. I also considered looking at the cost of moving the entire country into balloons on Venus, but I didn’t look at it either. My Mars city calculations over in the S&S section have now dissuaded me from taking a look at any such situation in a capitalist context. But I digress.

As far as apocalyptic stories or movies go, I like this one in that it has a relatively happy ending. I feel that “man just tears itself apart” type stories are too rooted in Hobbes’ view of man’s “true” nature without civilization, which was never meant to be an actual sociological or anthropological take on humanity and was simply a philosophical argument.

The truth is that we are very kind animals. It’s wrong to think that every man and woman would become a murderer the moment the kings and their courts were toppled; I think this idea focuses too much on the way law is used to restrain people and not enough on how morals do too. Yes, we can be violent. But if we were not primarily an altruistic species, I don’t think we would have gotten this far at all. “Men” (I use men in the sense of man vs. savage) created civilization, not the other way around.

IMO, of course.

Oh, and by the way, I now really feel like Moonfall was just an attempt to emulate what 2012 did but in an over the top way. I think 2012 works because the social phenomena of belief in that doomsday was popular. The idea of the Moon being an alien ark and it crashing in to Earth? At best a few dark web conspiracy lunatics know about it, at worst Roland just made it up himself and hoped people would be interested.

May 13

3 hours ago, DDE said:

So here's the problem: we're probably headed into leaner times (streaming + multiple box office bombs + general economic instability), and Hollywood doesn't have a good mechnism for cutting costs. In fact, as times get leaner, the meddling will increase, and so will risk mitigation through reliance on star power, and those guys and gals definitely aren't downshifting.

There's no real way for Hollywood as it currently is to avoid crashing and burning

Could it really ever collapse though?

There’s always gonna be millions going out and watching movies just to kill time or spend the day, even if it doesn’t look like a triple Oscar winner.

If there is something that’s going to die in the coming years, I’d expect it to be trilogies and reboots. The former due to the riskiness involved in committing to three movies in case one bombs, the latter because they have to run out of stuff to remake eventually, right?

Honestly it’s hard to see any industry or nation for that matter “crashing and burning” unless a movie mogul (or whatever) Gorbachev comes along. Everything just feels so monopolized and entrenched, from business models to the average person’s lifestyle and habits.

May 7

1 hour ago, DDE said:

Gas thieves in Pakistan. Normal tanks are banned from private use, so they siphon from mains into a wholly different type of enclosure

And here comes Kerman!

If there was no plan to add consent mechanics to KSP2’s multiplayer, sneaking up on unsuspecting ships and stealing their fuel would be an interesting challenge.

May 7

I finished reading the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. When I say finished reading, I mean reading the arguments rather than the evidence, because the book is kind of self-defeating after a certain point.

It claims, with evidence, that arguments about how the organization of society developed, mainly that we went from tribes to city-states to empires (I’m paraphrasing there), come from philosophy and are not supported by modern day anthropological and archaeological evidence.

I think their theories are very effective when it comes to looking at North America, because it’s self-evident from data gathered as early as the 19th century that the ways different groups of people organized their society varied. The idea of idyllic tribes living among nature, oblivious to complexity, philosophy, and creativity, is very much a colonial stereotype.

It gets more difficult to believe when they try to reframe theories about places in China, Egypt, Eastern Europe, and Mesopotamia, mainly because it involves thinking about well known places in different ways.

The authors successfully illustrate how scientists during anthropology’s infancy were captive to their own biases in creating notions like “the state” and categorizing societies based on their mode of subsistence.

But it raises the question of whether these authors are captive to their own biases (one is an anarchist activist) in trying to paint a certain picture of history being a certain way or another.

Their arguments about the nature of how we organize society track and so does their criticism of “big history”’s presentation of human history.

I am just skeptical how historical evidence can be used to support a discussion of those arguments (from either side) when, as illustrated when it comes to how Caucasian scholars looked at indigenous American societies and history and how that influenced the popular view of them, everyone seems to be so beholden to their political bias.

It’s still a good book though, and I recommend it to everyone. Just be careful not to take the evidence too seriously. They make clear how big history likes to cherry pick information to paint a picture of tribes-to-empires, but it is possible they are doing so too.

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