mybandisbetter

It is at least possible that a manufacturing ecosystem would be so difficult to develop that it would require fewer decades to transport products than to develop that ecosystem.

Such comparative advantage would likely disappear overtime, unless a given solar system actively keeps its technological know-how secret in some way, or controls the travel of skilled people (as in nuclear tech today). Or, perhaps, some solar systems may fail to create the institutional context necessary for building such a system — if, for example, they keep nuking themselves. In any case, it's not too hard to imagine scenarios in which such trade would be necessary.

While it is true that exercise cannot solve excessive calorie consumption (since exercising makes us eat more), it is important for weight management. A lack of exercise screws with the body's feedback loops, undermining its "metabolic flexibility": its ability to handle sugar and fat efficiently. Let's take a look at just one perverse feedback loop.

When your body has a glucose spike, it is very important that its billions of muscle cells are willing to say "yes" to insulin and uptake that glucose. Otherwise, the body lacks an efficient disposal mechanism. If you don't contract muscles throughout the week, insulin production has to go up to yell louder at muscle cells to please, please take the glucose. High insulin levels also sends two messages to fat cells: 1. do not release current fat stores for energy, and 2. absorb glucose to create more fat. When all that glucose finally is taken up by cells, and if insulin does not fall quickly enough, fat cells do not release energy (because insulin is telling them not to), and so the body becomes hungry even though it has excess fuel available.

Our bodies evolved under the conditions that we exercised to an extreme quantity everyday. Without exercise, its energy management systems get all nutty. Some level of exercise is important to avoid perverse, counterproductive feedback loops that undermine our goals.

I've often thought that "the speed of causality" would be a much better name for it. Interesting you landed on the same.

There's another problem with being obsessed with concision: it's more compatible with simple ideas than nuanced ideas. I work at a place where I'm required to explain urban planning issues while using the simplest-possible subjects in all sentences. So, I can write, "Transit improves traffic," but I can't write, "To the extent that transit enables residents to reach destinations more efficiently than driving, a greater number of proportion of people can travel without worsening traffic." This isn't a great example because I'm sure there's a simpler way to write my second sentence. The pattern I've noticed, however, is that I often need to be intellectually dishonest to write simple sentences with simple subjects, because they make the world seem simpler than it is. A complex world — full of gradations and marginal costs — often requires complex sentences.

I could give you my email address if you would like to discuss further. There is lots of good research on all of this.

In addition to being a quality human in these ways, I'd recommend googling "tactical urbanism." That means: do quick, low-cost interventions in your neighbourhood, like painting a mural on the street, building flower boxes, or creating a pocket park. (Should probably get permission, but for some things, just do it). This all helps attract people to the street and builds a sense of ownership, which encourages folks to make more improvements, creating self-reinforcing momentum. All this reduces local crime, both because of eyes-on-the-street and because it creates a feeling that people are paying attention and care about the place.

If you have abandoned commercial spaces, put art up in the empty windows to reduce the feeling that a place has been abandoned. If your streets feel dangerous because of traffic, work with local leaders to get approval for making low-cost changes to make it safer. For example, you can create sidewalk bumpouts using simple flower boxes. Talk to local lenders about what they can do to help local businesses get off the ground.

Be warned that if all this is successful, it risks leading to a big jump in housing prices, i.e., gentrification. Keep in mind that "gentrification" also tends to make local residents wealthier — it's not as simple as the usual picture in which locals are simply pushed out. However, it is important to start thinking now about solutions, because this will lead to some push-back. Ideally, the city or nonprofits should buy land now while property values are cheap to create housing trusts for low-income residents. This will always be a tough issue though.

There is a lot of small actions you can take locally to shift the momentum of your community. Lots of people have done it — you can do it.

Source: I'm an urban planner.

“We observed for the first time that the electron shell in a molecule does not react to light everywhere at the same time."

Question: does this not violate the "quantum" in quantum physics? I thought that a quantum particle had to be in either one state or another simultaneously in all places in the universe, because otherwise, it would have a gradient between one and the other, and its energy would no longer be quantised.

Ha, right, perhaps I hallucinated separately the image and the emotion that it is beautiful. My guess (just a guess) is that the images were themselves generated by the parts of the brain that register beauty, and so were beautiful by definition. If that's not true, I suspect that if you sat a large sample of people to look at these images, most would agree they were beautiful.

Personally, doing mushrooms helped me work out some stuff for my PhD thesis research. What he says about making your brain more plastic is the key point. I thought about things from a new angle, which directly informs my current research.

I also saw palpably how much I judge myself in every moment of the day, which I had never realized before. Reducing that judgement has become an important goal. That's just useful. It's not wacky far-out magic thinking.

Now, if I tried to describe to you the beauty of what I saw, I would say it looks like a cathedral, and have to stop there, or it will start to sound like nonsense. But that's only because we don't have useful language to discuss the specifics of the experience, so we have to try to use metaphors, which easily sound like BS, unless you've seen it yourself. But then, the metaphors used to describe any specialist field sounds a bit like BS if you don't have the technical language, or direct experience, to make sense of it.