3 stars
The scale of The Milky Way - why is the galaxy bigger than we think? | YouTube [Epic Spaceman]
The extreme scale of the The Orion Nebula | YouTube [Epic Spaceman]
What does the entire Universe look like? ...using cereal | YouTube [Epic Spaceman]
Well, I now have a new favourite YouTube channel; if only there were more than three videos in two years. But the effort and attention to detail in these videos is incredible. If you enjoy astronomy, you may not learn anything “new”…but I’d be surprised if you didn’t enjoy these:
I love the Milky Way, this crazy, giant whirlpool of stars that’s our home. And I remember being blown away learning that the cloudy line in the sky was something we’re actually inside, something that really confused me at first. So this video is really my attempt to bring a little more appreciation and clarity to our oasis in the Universe. Making it has really helped me get to grips with some of the scale of things and I might well do another shorter video showing the size and location of some other things in the Milky Way on the ‘US’ scale. I also tried to address that existential dread that can creep in when getting to grips with the scale of things like this. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, our galaxy makes a long walk down to the chemist’s look like peanuts so I’ve tried to temper that with a quick reminder of the scale of the really small stuff. I do personally like to remind myself that I’m actually huge when the cosmos gets a little too big for its boots and starts melting my brain.
There are few places if any in the Universe more beautiful than a nebula and The Orion Nebula is a particularly beautiful one. When I was a kid I couldn't believe a star in the constellation I was always looking at, Orion, wasn't actually a star. It led me to want to learn more about the Universe beyond the stars and I hope this film can do a little of that for others too.
The scale of the Universe might seem too big to grasp, what does the Universe even look like? What do you picture when you hear that word? Galaxies? Stars? Empty space? It can all seem so endless and overwhelming, so I made this video to try and fix that. This is a journey to the edge of the Universe and back, in a way that you hopefully don't lose all sense of scale. All to find an image of the Universe that's simple, relatable and you can even hold in your hands. So I used cereal!
The America That Americans Forget | New York Times [gift article]
As tensions with China mount, the U.S. military continues to build up Guam and other Pacific territories — placing the burdens of imperial power on the nation’s most ignored and underrepresented citizens.
We're Not Platonists, We've Just Learned The Bitter Lesson | Astral Codex Ten
Wonky but insightful:
Intelligence explosion arguments don’t require Platonism. They just require intelligence to exist in the normal fuzzy way that all concepts exist.
First, I’ll describe what the normal way concepts exist is. I’ll have succeeded if I convince you that claims using the word “intelligence” are coherent and potentially true.
Second, I’ll argue, based on humans and animals, that these coherent-and-potentially-true things are actually true.
Third, I’ll argue that so far this has been the most fruitful way to think about AI, and people who try to think about it differently make worse AIs.
Finally, I’ll argue this is sufficient for ideas of “intelligence explosion” to be coherent.
China notes, July ’23: on technological momentum | Dan Wang
Now we contend with a Chinese leadership that has even less tolerance for elite disagreement, which probably isn’t augmenting the space for policy debates. The dangers of political centralization are easy to identify. What are the upsides? I’m finding it harder to see them. Xi has consolidated power, not apparently because he sees long-standing policy logjams he wishes to break — but for its own sake. Unlike Deng, he is not driven by an urgent desire for economic reform. Instead, he seems to view his main task as notching up the national-security consciousness of the nation. Xi achieved the impossible task of disciplining the party and silencing political opposition; there isn’t much sign that he is pursuing a policy goal commensurate with such immense political weight.
Politics didn’t need to take center stage so long as the economy could deliver its ravishing spectacles. But growth now resembles an aging star, whose act keeps being stolen by the ghastly presence of the communist state. China’s long-term economic challenges are obvious: demographic drags, a peak in property demand, debt overhangs, and a western world intent on some degree of decoupling. The surprise is that the economy hit the skids only six months after the abandonment of zero-Covid. […]
China’s tech sector is being weighed down by slower economic growth and blows from both the US and Chinese governments. But these are not the whole story, for technology can be carried by a momentum of its own. I see China’s tech development to be, as usual, a mixed bag: some parts going poorly, other parts quite splendidly.
2 stars
Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs | Astral Codex Ten
I nearly stopped reading this after the first few paragraphs. Turns out it was worth sticking with it:
The obvious frame for this book is what has been fittingly termed the German Catastrophe: the fate of Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century, as viewed from the perspective of German nationalists who were not Nazis — the perspective of people like Ernst Jünger.
Germany had entered modernity without democracy. The Kaiserreich (German Empire) had united the many small German states, aggressively worked to catch up with industrialization, built a state to rival France and Great Britain, and remained authoritarian throughout. Commoners had negligible political influence. They did get social insurance, but not through their own political power but granted top-down, as an appeasement to undermine socialist movements. Civil marriage, secularized state education, prospering state universities and a long series of modernizing laws kept increasing state power. And that meant executive power. There were parties, a parliament and a newly homogenized judiciary, but they had little power to check the executive.
And this entire development was accompanied by a lot of theorizing about this new German nation. Much of this theorizing ended up justifying authoritarianism, by making quickly-spreading myths about how obedience to authority, respect for aristocracy and love for tradition were uniquely German traits that set Germans apart from the French and the Jews and other dubious foreigners. Such myths, and opposition to them, colored the German population’s hard work to get accustomed to industrialization, urbanization, education, rapid population growth, militarization, national media and various culture wars.
This had seemed to work okay-ish while Bismarck, wielding both enormous ruthlessness and enormous political acumen, had navigated Germany through the trials and tribulations of the late 19th century, largely at the expense of France. But in 1890, Emperor Wilhelm II had taken over authority with less ruthlessness and much less political acumen. While his populace remained nearly unable to influence politics, Wilhelm II made critical political mistakes, especially in dealing with other European powers.
These mistakes culminated in the first World War. You know how that one went.
Shakespeare In Its Original Pronunciation | Kottke
Speaking of inexpensive time travel, listen as David and Ben Crystal perform selections from Shakespeare in the original accent, as it would have been heard at the Globe in the early 1600s.
America’s Corporate Tragedy | The Atlantic
Caitlin Flanagan:
A boy has died in a poultry processing plant, and a hashtag is no response. […]
I was a child soldier in the California grape strikes, my labors conducted outside the Shattuck Avenue co-op in Berkeley. There I was, maybe 7 or 8 years old, shaking a Folgers coffee can full of coins at the United Farm Workers’ table where my mother was garrisoned two to three afternoons a week. I did most of my work alongside her, but several times an hour I would do what child soldiers have always done: served in a capacity that only a very small person could. I’d go out in the parking lot and slip between cars to make sure no one was getting away without donating some coins or signing a petition. I’d pop up next to a driver’s-side window and give the can an aggressive rattle. I wasn’t Jimmy Hoffa, but I wasn’t playing any games either.
Uh, guys, we really should think about spending more on defense | Noahpinion
Sobering:
That's not a message many people want to hear, but it's true. […]
Nor are these a bunch of little crappy ships that would be overmatched by their mighty American counterparts. New Chinese ships are now considered top of the line, able to match or nearly match American ships in quality while utterly overwhelming them in quantity.
So anyway, if we’re going to be able to match Chinese military power — even in concert with all our friends and allies — we need to spend a lot more on the military. If you say this in public, someone will inevitably reply that “we spend more on our military than the next 10 countries combined”, and call for cutting defense spending in order to fund either social spending or tax cuts, depending on which side of the political aisle they fall. But what does it mean for the U.S. to outspend all other nations when China can build warships at 200 times the rate we can? What does it mean for the U.S. to outspend all other nations if we can’t even keep up enough munitions production to supply Ukraine?
How Obama (and Trump and Biden) beat Europe | Slow Boring
Today, those forecasts don’t look so good. As Gideon Rachman recently wrote in the Financial Times, “in 2008 the EU’s economy was somewhat larger than America’s: $16.2 trillion versus $14.7 trillion. By 2022, the US economy had grown to $25tn, whereas the EU and the UK together had only reached $19.8 trillion.”
Europe is still a very nice place to go on vacation and exceeds America in some important public health outcomes, but the diverging economic fates are interesting and deserve some explanation. And I think a lot of what you hear about this doesn’t make sense because it cites transatlantic differences that have been in place forever — Europe had higher taxes and stronger labor unions than the United States 15 or 30 or 45 years ago. But for a while, they were catching up to us, whereas now they’re falling back. The question is what changed since George W. Bush left office.
How a Grad Student Uncovered the Largest Known Slave Auction in the U.S. | ProPublica
Lauren Davila made a stunning discovery as a graduate student at the College of Charleston: an ad for a slave auction larger than any historian had yet identified. The find yields a new understanding of the enormous harm of such a transaction.
Could an Industrial Civilization Have Predated Humans on Earth? | Nautilus
Yes, it’s my favourite pet theory again:
A thought experiment plumbs archaeology and geology to ask whether our own species will leave a trace.
1 star
Amazing Commercial Featuring the French National Football Team | Kottke
This advertisement from Orange, the French telecom company, about the French national football team is one of the best commercials I've seen recently. I don't want to tell you too much about it because the impact of it comes from watching it, so just watch it and you'll see.
People in 1920s Berlin Nightclubs Flirted via Pneumatic Tubes | Atlas Obscura
You hear it often: dating today doesn’t work like it used to. Or: apps like Tinder have made flirting more distant.
But the process of staring, judging, and messaging potential suitors from afar—hallmarks of modern dating apps—is not new. Beginning in the 1920s, nightclub-goers in Berlin who feared face-to-face encounters could communicate with beautiful strangers from across the room.
All they needed to do? Turn to the nearest pneumatic tube.
How Rubber Bands Are Made | Kottke
From natural rubber to hundreds of bands in a box, here's how a Japanese manufacturing firm makes rubber bands.
The Word “Blackmail” Has Nothing to Do With Mail | Useless Etymology
Here’s a mindbending etymology fact for you: The word “blackmail” originally had nothing to do with mail as in letters, or for that matter, anything else we’d call mail today.
Can a Lego Car Roll Downhill Forever? | Kottke
I just really love the hell out of these iterative Lego build videos from Brick Experiment Channel and Brick Technology. In this one, a car is repeatedly modified to roll perfectly on an increasingly inclined treadmill. I started watching and in 10 seconds I was 100% invested.