The poem is from someone whose online pseudonym is atiguhya padma.  I'll quote the first verse, the refrain, and the beginning of the second verse to give you enough flavor to decide if you want to follow the link.  There are about 9 verses total.

I broached the subject of cryonics with a family member today.  He offered almost none of the normal objections and I've been happy all day about the way the conversation went.  One interesting issue that he raised that I'd like to find an answer for is the question in the title.

Butter goes rancid after a while at room temperature.  It also goes rancid in the fridge and can absorb the other flavors if things aren't well contained inside the refrigerator.  Butter also goes rancid if left in a normal freezer, which mostly is designed to bring things very close to the melting point of water around 273 kelvin.

This suggests that lipid chemistry responds to temperatures in a different way than intuitions mostly educated by other examples of freezing, which is relevant because the brain is mostly made out of fat, with some complicating proteins mixed in.  My guess is that developing a "rancid brain" isn't likely to be a serious issue when you get down to the 77 kelvin of liquid nitrogen, but its still something I'd like to be able to answer directly and honestly, after really thinking about it in terms of "safety engineering".

One way to answer the direct question about butter might be to just perform the basic experiment with some butter samples at different temperatures (room, fridge, freezer, -80C freezer in a bio lab) and figure out how long butter stored each way takes to go rancid and then do some curve fitting, but that seems like it would take months or maybe even years, and butter doesn't even necessarily answer neurological questions directly.  Even if I learned about butter chemistry, there could be open questions about brain chemistry.  I've tentatively googled around for 30 minutes but organic chemistry isn't a primary area of expertise and I wasn't sure out to dig up the specialist scientific literature that might answer my question.

This community seemed like a good place to get help on the subject!

Here are some specific questions I'd love to know the answers to...

1. What are the precise chemical reactions are that are collectively referred to as rancidity in english, and how to they change at cryogenic temperatures?  Does butter stop going rancid in liquid nitrogen?

2. Are these or similar reactions possible in the brain, given all the cell membranes and mylenation and so on that are primarily made out of fat?

3. How much personality/memory/mind relevant information might be lost to rancidity, if it happened?  If there are brain or neuronal structures that are more likely to go rancid first, would the chemical changes involved in rancidity be likely to change our estimation of the structures "historical operation" or not?

4. The boiling point of oxygen is about 90 kelvin (13 degrees higher than nitrogen's boiling point).  If the liquid around a cryo-patient is not changed over time then we might expect the ratio of liquid oxygen to liquid nitrogen to increase over time.  Is the presence of the liquid oxygen relevant to rancidty issues or not?

Permutation City is an awesome novel that was written in 1994.  Even if the author, Greg Egan, used a caricature of this community as a bad guy in a more recent novel, his work is still a major influence on a lot of people around these parts who have read it.  It dissolves so many questions around uploading and simulation that it's hard for someone who has read the book to talk about simulationist metaphysics without wanting to reference the novel... but doing that runs into constraints imposed by spoiler etiquette.

So go read Permutation City if you haven't read it already because it's philosophically important and a reasonably fun read.

In the meantime, if you haven't then you should also read A Fire Upon The Deep by Vernor Vinge (of "singularity" coining fame) and then read Eliezer's fan fic The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover which references both of them in interesting ways to make substantive philosophical points and doesn't take too long to read.

In the comments below there will be discussion that has spoilers for all three works.

There will be a meetup for Southern California this Sunday, January 23, 2011 at 4PM and running for three to five hours.  The meetup is happening at Marco's Trattoria.  The address is:

8200 Santa Monica Blvd
West Hollywood, CA 90046

If all the people (including guests and high end group estimates) show up we'll be at the limit of the space with 24 attendees.  Previous meetups had room for walk-ins and future meetups should as well, but this one is full.  If you didn't RSVP in time for this one but want to get an email reminder when the February meetup is scheduled send me a PM with contact info.

Inspired by some of the comments in Back To The Basics I thought it might be interesting to see whether and how video embedding works in the discussion area.  The experiment is intended to function technically to see if this is possible, but also socially to see if the reaction is good and the comments are high quality.

When trying to set up this video I clicked the "HTML" button among the text tools (to the right of "Insert/edit image" and to the left of "Insert horizontal ruler".  In the text box that popped up, I pasted the html that I had already found on youtube by pressing the "Embed" button for a video that seemed thematically appropriate.

Assuming that this technically succeeds, we'll all have an some anecdotal evidence about whether videos are a positive contribution to LW.

One thing that might be useful to mention is that QualiaSoup has produced about 28 videos of which I picked one that seemed particularly relevant to this forum and that I watched before posting.  I didn't really learn anything from this but I also didn't notice anything glaringly wrong with it.  If this experiment is good enough to repeat we might want to think about the standards we'd expect video posts to live up to.  Not sure what those should be, but it seemed like a good idea to mention that conversation around this might be useful.

Without further ado, "The Problem With Anecdotes"...

A meetup in Southern California will occur on Sunday December 19, 2010.  The meetup will start around 3:30PM and run for at least 2 hours and possibly 4 or 5.  Anna Salamon and Yvain are very likely to be in attendance, as well as people from the last few meetups who may have projects to talk about, if are people are interested.  Bring guests if you like.  The location of the meetup will be...

...at the IHOP across from John Wayne Airport, about a mile from UC Irvine.

One of the shiniest ideas I picked up from LW is inferential distance.  I say "shiny" because the term, so far as I'm aware, has no clear mathematical or pragmatic definition, no substantive use in peer reviewed science, but was novel to me and appeared to make a lot of stuff about the world suddenly make sense.  In my head it is marked as "super neat... but possibly a convenient falsehood".  I ran across something yesterday that struck me a beautifully succinct and helpful towards resolving the epistemic status of the concept of "inferential distance".

In an attempt to find a useful "base rate expectations" for the rest of my life (and how actions I might take now could set me up to be much better off 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 70 years from now) I'm looking for a book that describes the nuts and bolts of human lives.  I want coherent discussion from an actuarial/economic/probabilistic/calculating perspective, but I'd like some soulfulness too.  The ideal book would be published in 2010 and have coverage of the different periods of people's lives and cover different aspects of their lives as well.  In some sense the book would be like a nuts and bolts "how to your your life" manual.  Hopefully it would have footnotes and generally good epistemology :-)

To take an example of the kind of content I would hope for (in a domain where I already have worked out some of the theory myself) the ideal book would explain how to calculate the ROI of different levels of college education realistically.  Instead of a hand-waving argument that "on avergae you'll make more with education" it would also talk about the opportunity costs of lost wages, and how expected number of years of work impacts on what amount of training makes sense, and so on. 

To be clear, I don't want a book that is simply about deciding when, how, and for how long it makes sense to train for a job.  Instead I want something that talks about similar issues that I haven't already thought about but that are important, so that I can be usefully educated in ways I wasn't expecting.  My goal is to find someone else's scaffold to help me project when and why I should (or shouldn't) buy a minivan, how much to budget for dentistry in my 50's, and a breakdown of the causes of bankruptcy the way insurance companies can predict causes of death.

I was hoping that the book How We Live: An Economic Perspective on Americans from Birth to Death would give me what I want (and it is still probably my fallback book if I can't find anything better) but it was written in 1983, and appears to be strongly oriented towards public policy recommendations rather than personal choice.

Books that may be conceptually nearby that seem non-ideal include:

Dear Undercover Economist: Priceless Advice on Money, Work, Sex, Kids, and Life's Other Challenges - My second place fallback because it covers real life content, is from 2009, and the first book in the series was pretty solid on economic theory.  The problem is that it seems like haphazard coverage of the subject matter rather than "a treatise" that aims to describe the full ambit of life issues, sort them by priority, and deal usefully with the big stuff.

The Average Life of the Average Person: How It All Adds Up - Just a collection of factoids, like the number of cumulative days the average person spends on the toilette, the value add is the collection and the juxtaposition.  Mere factoids might actually be useful as a list of things to think about optimizing for long term impact?  Not what I want, but potentially relevant.

The ABCs Of Strategic Life Planning - The first problem is that this appears to be a workbook with questionnaires (presumed target market is people dealing with akrasia) rather than a narrative of fact and theory (giving the logical scaffold for a general plan).  The second problem is that the marketing means it is probably from the business/self-help genre from which I expect relatively little epistemic rigor.

The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want - This book covers the "softer issues" that I definitely care about and don't expect to be covered by economists.  It seems potentially interesting, but in addition to not covering the other subject areas, it sounds more like a literature review of positive psychology results than like a "normal life overview".

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World - It is good that this is recent (from 2008) but it is poorly reviewed, haphazard in subject, and full of shiny stuff that's intended to be stimulatingly non-intuitive.  I'm looking for meat and potatoes.

Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life - Purportedly a lot of economic theory (which is not what I'm looking for) and then some shiny examples that Freaknomics later (it was written in 1997) made somewhat trendy.  However, the title sounds like the book could have been close to what I want.

Can anyone suggest a book that is "a coherent overview of the intersection of these books and anything else I forgot"?  There may be no book that matches my ideal, but I wouldn't be surprised if something pretty close to it exists that I just haven't found yet.

Help appreciated!

This is Part 2 of the discussion of Alicorn's Twilight fanfic Luminosity. 

LATE BREAKING EDIT: Part 3 exists now, so new comment threads should be started there rather than here.

In the vein of the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion threads this is the place to discuss anything relating to Alicorn's Twilight fanfic Luminosity. The fanfic is also archived on Alicorn's own website.

Here is Part 1 of the discussion.  Previous discussion is hidden so deeply within the first Methods of Rationality thread that it's difficult to find even if you already know it exists.

Similar to how Eliezer's fanfic popularizes material from his sequences Alicorn is using the insights from her Luminosity sequence.

The fic is really really good but there is a twist part way through that makes the fic even more worth reading than it already was, but that makes it hard to talk about because to even ask if someone is twist-aware with any specific hints is difficult.  The twist is in the latter half of the story.  If you are certainly not post-twist and want to save the surprise, then you should stop reading here and fall back to Part 1 discussion or to the fic itself.