blogjou

Slide down the intelligence ladder

And that’s not the worst of your revelation. You realize that the next time you return here, with your thick horse brain, you won’t have the capacity to ask to become a human again. You won’t understand what a human is. Your choice to slide down the intelligence ladder is irreversible. And just before you lose your final human faculties, you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human.

Fantasies

God: > Your fantasies have cursed your realities.

Egalitaire

The Communists are baffled and irritated, because they have finally achieved their perfect society, but only by the help of a God in whom they don’t want to believe. The meritocrats are abashed that they’re stuck for eternity in an incentivelesssystem with a bunch of pinkos. The convervatives have no penniless to disparage; the liberals have no downtrodden to promote.

So God sits on the edge of Her beed and weeps at night, because the only thing everyone can agree upon is that they’re all in Hell.

The Wozniaks and the Segways

After about five and a half hours of watching magic shows with the Wozniaksm we headed out of the club toward the valet. We handed our stub to the attendantm but the Wozniaks just kept walking toward the dark parking lot.

• ME: You guys didn’t valet?
• WOZ: No. Actually, we Segwayed.
• LAUREN: You what?
• WOZ: Segwayed! We’re staying at the W hotel a few miles up Hollywood Boulevard, so we just Segwayed here. Wanna see? ME: Uh…yeah?

They led us across the parking lot to a corner where, propped against a little shed, were two old Segways.

• ME: Bet you got on the Segway bandwagon pretty early?
• WOZ: Oh, you bet! These are the first Segways! See?!

He showed me the serial numbers on the handlebars: 001 and 002.

• ME: Wow! The first two Segways!
• WOZ: Yeah! The only thing is, they didn’t create any sort of headlight till later models, so we have to use these.

He pulled two flashlights out of his jacket pocket and gave one to his wife. With one hand operating the Segway, the other holding a flashlight, they drove off, looking as silly and happy as two people could.

How could this happen?

People were asking, “How could this happen?” And unfortunately, the answer is obvious. First, it’s real easy to get your hands on a high-powered assault rifle in America. Combine that with a president who de-stigmatized outward hatred in social-media platforms that allow people to stoke flames of hatred to the point of combustion.

Because of Twitter, the shooter didn’t see himself as a villain. He saw himself as a hero. This guy thought Jews were facilitating the entrance of terrorists into the country - an idea that’s been perpetuated by countless verified Twitter accounts, right-wing outlets, and GOP politicians. And without Jack doing anything to stop the spread of these lies, all he was telling people was that they were NOT lies. If they were, he wouldn’t be endorsing and amplifying them, right? Wouldn’t he take the verification away from people who dpread these lies if they were in fact lies? No action, no infraction. It all must be true.

One of the first times the militant ant anti-Semitic right wing started to target me online was after I told off Ben Carson for saying that Jews could have protected themselves better during the Holocaust if they’d had easier access to guns. A crazy idea that not only blames Jews for being victims but uses the deaths of the Holocaus to bolster America’s ridiculous gun laws.

These victim-blaming talking points were being repeated just hours after the shooting, not only by the media but by the president himself. The idea that it’s up to the threatened classes to protect themselves from bigots rather than up to the bigots not to spread hatred anc act on their terrible instincts is a stupid as, well, Trump.

Are you Jew...ish?

It’s not like other religions in that way. Even if you don’t believe in Judaism, you, my friend, are still a Jew. You can’t really opt out of it.

Maybe that’s why Jews are Jewish. It’s more vague and casts a wider net than other religions. “I’m a Hindu.” “I’m a Muslim.” “I’m Jew…ish.” Less commitment is involved when “ish” is in the mix. I’m not starving. I’m hungry-ish. I’m not freezing. Im cold-ish. I’m not a Jew, but I’m fore sure Jewish.

Acorn review: The persistent mystery of declining growth in older forests

Abstract

Forests are very diverse all over the world, but they all share the decline in diameter growth rather after an early plateau (moment of full canopy development). Growth of trees and forests may be determined by other factors than carbon supply.

1. Introduction

It’s not the tall trees that slow down in diameter growth but the medium to small trees. They really decline in grwoth rate which reduces the forest’s growth rate. This can be caused at three levels:

• resource use
• efficiency
• partitioning

2. Resource use

• decrease in LAI:
  • due to collisions of branches, nutrient supply, hydraulic constraints on moving water up
  • LAI reduction by 30% leads to light interception reduction of 10-20% (less self-shading)
  • not enough to explain decreasing stem growth
• water flow in streams draining old forests smaller than in young forests: declining water use cannot explain declining growth
• not many studies on age vs nutrient supply
  • big trees could limit nutrient availability of smaller trees
  • fertilization increases growth
  • but: still the same pattern of decreasing growth

3. Efficiency: Declines in growth per unit of resource use

• efficiency seems more site-dependent than age-dependent

4. Partitioning

• tempting assumption: older forests have more tissue and respire more, less C available for growth
• but: most tissue is dead, half of respiration comes from growth, studies show lower respiration in older forests
• below-ground C flux usually declines in concert with stemwood growth; no universal pattern though

5. Beyond Carbon: Fitness may be about more than photosynthesis and C budgets

• seemingly: declining PH from declining resource use efficiency, then different partitioning
• Is this focus on C sufficient?
• growth often out of synchrony with C assimilation
• growth not always limited by rate of C uptake
  • trees might not maximize C uptake, might partition elsewhere to dispose of excess C (see Prescott et al., 2021)
  • REDUNDANCY???
• once hierarchy of trees is established, trees arrange with it
• older trees use resources less efficient, why?

6. Three key points for the future

• more data needed for aging forests, managed and unmanaged
• do trees sustain their established social status?

When Iraq invaded Kuwait...

Scaling up, when Iraq invaded Kuwait and neighbours such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE feared they might be next, they were happy to see the US-led multinational coalition deal with the problem. Doubly so, as many of these countries either lacked the forces to make substantial contribution or - as in Saudi Arabia’s case - the desire to do any fighting. So instead the stumped up direct payments of $84 billion to the US, Britain and France, who did the lion’s share of the fighting, and extra support to cover bases and logistics. No one would suggest that the combatant countries actually made a profit on the war, or that they were motivated by the payments. Nonetheless, the way that rich but militarily weak of self-indulgent nations could simply outsource the violence - and the dying - to foreigners is a pattern that Macchiavelli would have recognised from the days when mercenary captains fought Italian city-states’ wars for them.

The UN pays a flat fee of around $1,500 per soldier per month...

The UN pays a flat fee of around $1,500 per soldier per month, but to the state providing the force, not the individual grund on the ground. That would not cover the basic pay and provisions of a British Army private but compares very favourably with an Ethiopian average salary of $275 per month, and the government can pocket the difference between what the UN provides and what it pays its men.

Soldiers can be drafted into all kinds of other roles in the name of security...

Soldiers can be drafted into all kinds of other roles in the name of security - and for the same reason, all kinds of other institutions and individuals can be deployed to ‘do security’.