polyfractal

Oh hey, this was me. Happy to answer questions if anyone has them :)

Eh, not so much generation as different way people think. I'm not old, have multiple laptops, desktops and smart phones. More often than not, when I need to seriously think about a paper I print it out and annotate the margins, underline, highlight, etc. I have a notebook (and fountain pens!) that I use to write out plans or projects or sketch designs. I have pads of flip paper for short-term (weekly) TODOs, and bullet-journal longer term life planning.

It's just a different way of organizing one's life. I spend enough time in front of the computer, sitting at the kitchen table to jot down notes or sketch out a project idea works better for me than trying to try the latest XYZ digital notebook app.

++ Came here to post the Planet Money episode. :)

A minor note: the LightSail team says the perigee is lowering due to atmospheric drag not due to the sun slowing it down:

> The perigee, or low point of its orbit, has dropped by a similar amount, which is consistent with pre-flight expectations for the effects of atmospheric drag on the spacecraft.

That's not to say the solar pressure isn't potentially slowing it down too, but it sounds like the main driver is drag in this case.

"Chronic Lyme" is notoriously difficult to diagnose because there is very little evidence that it is a real illness. While there is some research on the subject, the medical community still widely believes that chronic lyme is Not A Thing.

You often find chronic lyme being diagnosed and "treated" by alternative medical practictioners, homeopaths, naturalpaths, etc who then prescribe a wide array of untested treatments, batteries of blood tests and panels of ELISA antigen screens which are so cross-reactive that just about anything will show up. More often than not patients are being swindled out of vast sums of money by these alternative "treatments". A quote from the GP article shows exactly this situation:

> I’ve gobbled up herbal tonics, CBD oil, a universe of different probiotics, antibiotics, anti-parasitics, and an endless array of supplements promising myriad purported benefits. Most provided little, if any, comfort.

> [...] many people with Lyme flock to “Lyme literate” doctors (LLMDs), who, citing the unreliability of Lyme testing, are willing to make a diagnosis based exclusively on symptoms. [...] With no scientific consensus on what causes persistent symptoms and how to treat them, such options aren’t covered by insurance, leaving people like me to fund treatment entirely out of pocket. I’ve visited several LLMDs with mixed results. [...] Finding a trustworthy LLMD can be difficult and expensive for Lyme patients. The LLMDs I consulted in New York offered initial consultations ranging from $800 to $2,000, with each follow-up visit costing anywhere between $300 and $500 each.

It's not to say the symptoms are not real, but they are far more likely to be fibromyalgia or similar than a mysterious chronic infection of lyme which is untreatable. Articles like the above and the GP do not help the situation, and people end up believing random woo on the internet than their medical providers.

Because enough people will believe it when they see an asteroid looming towards them on CNN, Fox, whatever. There are plenty of people that deny climate change because it's convenient, either politically or economically. There are considerably fewer people that think the moon landing was faked, or the earth is flat, or pluto and mars and jupiter are actually jewels hanging from threads in a crystal sphere.

An asteroid is a sufficiently "concrete" science that the average person would believe if they see it. You can't "see" climate change, which is part of the issue.

There is a real difference between a singular event like an asteroid, and a slowly boiling frog like climate change.

You can point at an asteroid and say "That thing. It's going to melt half the planet." I'd like to think we could collectively get our shit together and find a way to fix that.

But climate change is more insidious because it's so slow. It's in every nations best (short term) interest to ignore climate change. And there are zero short-term consequences to politicians because the average person probably won't measurably see an effect in their lifetime. Sure, summers might get a bit hotter and have worse floods, winters get a bit colder. New pests will pop up, species might start to die. But there's not a galvanizing event to really scare the shit out of people. Even if people believe climate change, they'll shrug, tsk tsk a little (like I'm doing!), maybe stop using plastic bags or install solar on their house or something. But it's negligible, and they know it's a meaningless gesture because everyone else has to make the same gesture for it to work.

Eventually it'll get bad enough -- widespread fires, droughts, rampant pest or diseases, all the pollinators die out, whatever -- that people really start to take things seriously. But by that time we might have 20 billion humans on the brink of starvation and it'll be a bit late to do much more than try to survive.

I doubt humans will ever go extinct completely. We're pretty hardy primates. But it's very possible we get knocked back to hunter/gather tribes (probably with some neat technology!) scraping a living in some kind of post-apocalyptic industrial nightmare.

It's especially tragic because any attempt to fix the situation implicitly crushes nations that are presently bootstrapping themselves into industrialization. E.g. major "developed" countries got a free ride on cheap, dirty fossil fuels. But now the climate is going to shit, and if by some miracle they managed to get themselves to carbon-negative (lol sure), you'd also have to prevent other developing nations from going down the cheap/dirty fossil fuel route themselves.

Which is crazy when you think about it. How's that going to work? Is the US and the EU going to give up half their GDP subsidizing clean energy in foreign nations to prevent further carbon release? Subjugate those countries to forcibly prevent them from industrializing?

It's truly a tragedy of the commons writ large. Short of some breakthrough in carbon sequestration or cold fusion or whatever, we're pretty screwed no matter how you look at it :(

Mars is a radically different planet and has its own climate. It doesn't have anything to do with the sun getting warmer though, e.g. we can't blame the sun for the Earth warming up just because Mars is also warming up.

A few of the key differences off the top of my head:

- The polar caps of mars are mostly frozen CO2 ("dry ice"), and also mostly disappear during the summer. You can see timelapse animations showing them shrinking and growing by like 90% each year. Their behavior is radically different from our frozen water ice caps, and have a huge difference in thermal mass too.

- Mars has a very thin atmosphere, mostly inactive geology, and no oceans. That means it has very little in the way of thermal buffering

- Mars goes through it's own Milankovitch cycles (changes in orbit eccentricity, axial tilt, precession) which means it undergoes it's own warming/cooling cycles just like earth. It happens to be in a warming cycle right now.

- Enormous dust storms can take over the planet for months at a time, which obviously has a huge impact on global climate

- We have a very short record of observing Mars' climate, so we can't really make long term trend analysis like we can on Earth

Except that, from the article, the only way to really use IPFS for pretty names is to use DNSlink and not IPNS. Because IPNS is unusably slow.

So IPFS might not theoretically rely on DNS, but it seems that it does practically rely on DNS if you actually want to use it.