Comment author: morganism 12 September 2016 10:40:45PM 2 points [-]

Long-term consequences of observing an expanding cosmological civilization.

"What sort of boundary forms between their expanding domains, and how does the presence of one limit the ambitions of another? "

"If a domain is visible at the time one embarks on expansion, there exists an optimum value for the "practical speed limit," and if the speed limit is much higher than optimal, one's future will be severely limited. In the case of two visible domains, it is possible to be "trapped" by them if the practical speed limit is high enough and their angular separation in the sky is large enough, i.e. one's expansion in any direction will terminate at a boundary with the two visible civilizations. "

http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.07522

Comment author: morganism 12 September 2016 10:16:26PM -1 points [-]

Yeah , the reason we don't talk about it is that it's karma immolation.....Keneysian war can be tough as evolutionary pressure.

But we still have to talk about it more, there are just too many people impacted.

But, here is a list of the tent cities large enough, and stable enough to have been named. .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tent_cities_in_the_United_States

Camp Hope, Las Cruces, New Mexico [1]
Camp Quixote, Olympia, Washington State[2]
Camp Take Notice, Ann Arbor, Michigan[3]
Dignity Village, Portland, Oregon
Opportunity Village, Eugene, Oregon
Maricopa County Sheriff’s Tent City, Phoenix, Arizona
New Jack City and Little Tijuana, Fresno, California[2]
Nickelsville, located in Seattle[2][4]
Right 2 Dream Too, Portland, Oregon[5]
River Haven,[6] Ventura County, California[7][8]
Safe Ground, Sacramento, California[2]
The Jungle, San Jose, California[2]
Temporary Homeless Service Area (THSA), Ontario, California[2]
Tent City (100+ residents) of Lakewood, New Jersey[9][10]
Tent City, Avenue A and 13th Street, Lubbock, Texas[11]
Tent City, New Jersey forest[12]
Tent City, Bernalillo County, New Mexico[13]
Tent City, banks of the American River, Sacramento, California[14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]
Tent City 3, Seattle
Tent City, Chicago, Illinois [1]
Tent City 4, eastern King County outside of Seattle
The Point, where the Gunnison River and Colorado River meet[23]
The Village of Hope and Community of Hope, Fresno, California[2]
Transition Park, Camden, New Jersey
Tent City, Fayette County, Tennessee, [2]
Camp Unity Eastside, Woodinville, WA [3]
China Hat Road, Bend, Oregon
Comment author: gjm 12 September 2016 04:19:36PM -1 points [-]

In particular, there is a rather important bit missing: what happens to the price of the products (or services) that these people produced.

Yeah, in retrospect I should have said something like

(In this case, what probably happens next -- at least if there is competition -- is that the company lowers its prices somewhat. So now the business owners win and their customers win. In the long run these lower prices may lead to new jobs.)

... Oh, wait. I did.

Comment author: morganism 12 September 2016 10:10:30PM 0 points [-]

No, what happens is that the original producer plays a stock short on the new guy, does an M & A on them, then liquidates the new company while trapping any intellectual property and patents in the safe.

Then we lose competition, price pressure, and innovation.

And even more folks are out of work.

The progressive case for replacing the welfare state with basic income

-5 morganism 11 September 2016 10:41PM

I really like this argument for UBI, it looks at the real problems on the front lines of current problems with existing programs.

Something has to be done about this, none of those manufacturing, or managerial jobs are coming back, and the minimum wage increase movement is going to really hammer youth and the un-skilled. Those are the easiest to radicalize, and once they get really angry, things could get ugly very quickly.

"because they aren’t publicly acknowledging just how poorly our present means-tested programs are targeted by virtue of their applied conditions, and just how unequal one dollar can be to one dollar, however counterintuitive that may seem."

"The fact is that cash welfare, as it exists today, is not given to the overwhelming majority of those living in poverty who need it."



https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/09/the-progressive-case-for-replacing-the-welfare-state-with-basic-income/


Comment author: ArisKatsaris 01 September 2016 09:58:08AM 1 point [-]

Short Online Texts Thread

Comment author: morganism 10 September 2016 11:59:46PM 0 points [-]

A Quantum of Consciousness

Broadly speaking, suggestions about the mechanisms that might cause consciousness can be grouped into three: (i) the vital spark of life, (ii) an emergent property from basic control functions of the central nervous system and (iii) a special relationship between spooky quantum interactions and life.

But repeated experiments have shown that electron transfer in photosynthesis has an efficiency greater than ninety-nine percent, probably because of superposition and electron tunnelling.

And evidence is gathering that many enzymes may use spookiness for electron transfer. Enzymes are the classic controlling agents for the body’s biochemistry: the hierarchy is that DNA makes RNA makes enzymes, which then go on to regulate everything else. Many other biological systems are currently being investigated for quantum influences such as vision, olfaction, magnetoreception (detecting magnetic fields) and Brownian motors (typically nano-scale engines in a cell that convert chemical into mechanical energy)."

"Maybe, just maybe, consciousness is an emergent property of the positive and negative feedbacks between quantum mechanics effects at the level of single ions and an overarching electromagnetic field around the brain."

"To conclude we have no evidence that consciousness and self-awareness are caused by the number of links in a digital system."

http://www.baen.com/quantum_consciousness

Comment author: morganism 10 September 2016 11:20:57PM *  0 points [-]

CRISPR Screen in Toxoplasma Identifies Essential Apicomplexan Genes.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27594426?dopt=Abstract#

this is great, they screened and found the invasion factor in the invasive organs that allow Toxo and malaria to slither inside cells and infect.

"Secondary screens identify as an invasion factor the claudin-like apicomplexan microneme protein (CLAMP), which resembles mammalian tight-junction proteins and localizes to secretory organelles, making it critical to the initiation of infection. CLAMP is present throughout sequenced apicomplexan genomes and is essential during the asexual stages of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum. These results provide broad-based functional information on T. gondii genes and will facilitate future approaches to expand the horizon of antiparasitic interventions."

Virus-Like Nanoparticle Vaccine Confers Protection against Toxoplasma gondii.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27548677?dopt=Abstract#

Upon challenge infection with a lethal dose of T. gondii (ME49), all vaccinated mice survived, whereas all naïve control mice died. Vaccinated mice showed significantly reduced cyst load and cyst size in the brain.

Comment author: morganism 10 September 2016 10:58:55PM 0 points [-]

SETI at X-ray Energies - Parasitic Searches from Astrophysical Observations

Was published in 1997, but uploaded to arXiv too make it more accessible.

"If a sufficiently advanced civilization can either modulate the emission from an X-ray binary, or make use of the natural high luminosity to power an artificial transmitter, these can serve as good beacons for interstellar communication without involving excessive energy costs to the broadcasting civilization. "

http://arxiv.org/abs/1609.00330

Havn't heard anything lately on this, so maybe never got funded? But i still have postulated that the universal communication standard should be spectral lines, not binary bits.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 01 September 2016 09:57:55AM 1 point [-]

Nonfiction Books Thread

Comment author: morganism 10 September 2016 10:50:40PM *  0 points [-]

Just adding this to my booklist, by Carlo Rovelli, the LQG guy.

The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy

https://www.amazon.com/Anaximander-Carlo-Rovelli/dp/159416262X/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

A history of philosophy and science.

"Most of the book is on the history and philosophy of science as well as the nature and evolution of religious thought. In fact, the book's main theme is how scientific thinking was liberated from mythic-religious thinking. This is centered on Anaximander since it is believed that he played a key role in this revolution, having lived in the appropriate period."

And an interview

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/the-philosophy-of-guessing-has-harmed-physics-expert-says/

One of his more amusing papers on Loop Quantum Gravity, is about building a framework of the universe without time.

"Following a line of research that I have developed for several years, I argue that the best strategy for understanding quantum gravity is to build a picture of the physical world where the notion of time plays no role. I summarize here this point of view, explaining why I think that in a fundamental description of nature we must "forget time", and how this can be done in the classical and in the quantum theory. The idea is to develop a formalism that treats dependent and independent variables on the same footing. In short, I propose to interpret mechanics as a theory of relations between variables, rather than the theory of the evolution of variables in time. "

http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.3832

Comment author: James_Miller 10 September 2016 07:20:21PM 1 point [-]

it looks like this is a big boost to the simulation argument.

It could be that you only get civilizations "in universes is governed by a tiny subset of all possible functions" because else wise either evolution can't "discover" how to create intelligent life, or evolved intelligent life can't figure out science.

Comment author: morganism 10 September 2016 10:21:11PM 0 points [-]

Or it could also be that all the matter in the universe has already been converted to "smart matter" and is running basic algorithms and rulesets.....

Comment author: morganism 10 September 2016 08:08:35PM 1 point [-]

This also reminds me of the scale of the universe claims that everything from subatomics to galaxy clusters scale at 10x9.

animations: http://scaleofuniverse.com/

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120312.html

cosmological https://archive.org/details/arxiv-astro-ph9404054

table http://physicsoftheuniverse.com/numbers.html

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