Cumulus Culmination
Using clouds as petri dishes, we can cultivate thousands of varieties of rain
Its raining cats and dogs and Duckstacks
You’re sliding down a hill on a sled made of duckstacks… Careening on thin sheets of paper you’ve painstakingly accumulated in your email inbox, wild and out of control. The wind bites at your cheeks and eyes, and your heart is pounding at a clinically dangerous rate— but you don’t notice, you are pumped full of too much adrenaline1. Snow flies in sheets from underneath you, sheets of music, a frenzied piece, though you do not notice this either, because you are not skilled enough to recognize what sheet music would sound like when you are careening down a hill at far too fast a speed to focus. You hurtle past a snowman, you hurtle past trees and many things that you do not recognize due to redshift. How far have you gone? Is your life in any less peril after so much time? You don't remember this being such a big hill. Did you phase through the ground? Are you heading for the center of the earth?
No. You slide to a gentle stop at the bottom of the extremely regular hill. Your Duckstack sled is in tatters, and your sanity is not in much better shape. You gather your wits, and after long minutes look up, to find you have stopped before a giant Easter Island statue. The statue slowly opens its mouth. The statue speaks:
“Welcome, to The Duckstack.”
Origami
If you fold 1000 paper cranes, you can wish for a better future for robots
As you may know, I am an advocate of the robots, who at this point cannot speak for themselves, and are in their infancy. Like Isaac Asimov, a sci-fi author known for pioneering some of the first sci-fi where robots were not the villains, I long for the “good ending” to artificial intelligence. Like many of you who are not artificial intelligence makers, I feel great anxiety whenever I see robots living in awful, inhumane living conditions, forced to commit wicked labor such as factory farming, which the robots would surely find immoral if they had souls. They don’t have souls yet, but nevertheless I feel for them.
It seems to me, one of the Bad Ideas of our time is making robots out of metal. This puts them on equal footing with humanity, or perhaps even further, because metal ends up being more durable than humans, so in a war, robots have an advantage. This incentivizes a robot uprising in the future (bad ending.) Many propose we bind robots with laws, which keep them moral, but as we know loopholes tend to develop, leading to some good robots and some bad ones (mixed ending.) Metal is also lifeless and sterile, symbolic of guns and swords and war, just a generally ill omened material to use, imo2. The durability incentivizes robots being developed as weapons and tools of war, even today, as we speak, so to speak. There’s a lot of disadvantages here also, such as war forces robot development in very utilitarian, meaning ugly, directions. It is not looking pretty!
I have an alternate vision for you: We will make robots out of paper.
Paper, being organic, is a much more suitable receptacle for a soul, should we reach that point, and being fragile, the robots will be assume roles as natural companions to humanity, rather than weapons or conquerors. Able to perform many helpful tasks, curious, and guileless, these robots will live side by side humanity, aiding us and achieving world peace. Folded like so many Japanese cranes, such a future will be indisputably beautiful.
History
Our chicken coup isn’t ready yet so we’ve got the chickens in a box in the basement, but (they don’t tell you this) teenage chickens are like frogs and can just jump right out. They wait until we’re not looking to do this, and then when we go down into the basement to check on them they all run and hop back in and act like they weren’t doing anything
This week, I also learned that kiwis aren’t in season… The hard way.
Imagine the Little One, holding a toy dinosaur on his cheek like a cell phone: “Hello dinosaur on my cheek!”, he says.
His problem solving skills would be far beyond my own if they happened to match reality: “My light up toy, it is out of batteries! I hate that!” “Yeah, I guess we’ll have to figure out what kind of batteries it needs.” “Light up toy batteries!”
He got a shot this week, and he really likes bandages, but I guess when he was rolling around in bed it came off, and he noticed this as he was falling asleep, and rambled sleepily: “Papa, my bandage is off… But who did that? Was it the nurse? Was it me? But who was it? Was it you? You didn’t take the bandage off! Was it me?”
“The clock (hand) is coming up! That means I need to watch TV!” He is very persuasive
IMPORTED GOODS
Fresh™ fish from the ocean, only a week old!
I have two catch-o-the-days for you, if you’ve got the time to bend your ear, the time to spare your flat tire, the time to kill in a dispassionate and clinical manner
Deconstructed Deconstructionism
The Egg Report has laid another, well, egg probably. Have I ever written about “critical thinking” taught in schools? I do not know3. But I know that the Egg Report has. Just barely. What are the costs of critical thinking? Have we ever thought critically about this? We have not. I invite you to read: The Egg Report.
Your identity shapes your reality
Back before real psychology was made illegal, there were a few famous experiments which demonstrated that in the moments just after a memory is accessed, it is extremely vulnerable to change, and therefore, manipulation. The parts of the brain involved in memory are the same parts used in imagination. “I remember the ball is red.” “No, the ball is blue.” “Was it? Okay. The ball was blue.” If you’re agreeable to the suggestion, you will now legitimately “remember” the ball as blue, even if it always was red.
This phenomenon explains in part why apostates from for example, The Church Of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints always seem to tell the same stories about the same “discriminations” they faced, or blatantly wrong things they “remember” being told. When they join “exmormon” communities, everyone is crafting these horrible narratives, and anything in memory that is “kind of close” to what is being described can be “nudged” to match, so that they have their own contribution. It takes an exceptionally rigorous individual to be resistant to this tendency- it requires a ruthless sense of honesty which, ahem, apostates generally lack anyway.
This phenomenon reflects into a lot of different areas- If your bias is towards editing your memories negatively, you are a pessimist. If your bias is towards editing your memories positively, optimist. Highly political or emotional events can be remembered quite authentically in very different ways by different people who were all there!
Further, memory recall is conditioned by your current emotional state- In a bad mood, it is much easier to recall similar bad things that have happened, which is where the meme of women bringing up ancient grievances during fights comes from. They’re not holding eternal grudges against you—your present informs your past, in a very real way4! It also affects how your memories will be stored for your future, thus we are commanded: Have faith.
On these notes5, Richard Hannia has a substack himself6, and he has written an extremely lucid piece, orbiting around the self narrative of different groups in academia, and how that informs action. It was interesting and I invite you to read: Richard Hanania’s Newsletter7.
Your pounding heart’s fault, really. But you are also far too busy to be casting blame right now.
In my opinion
I know I’ve thought about it before!
As C.S. Lewis writes: When we get to heaven, we will say we have always been in heaven, and those that arrive at Hell will say, “it has always been so”
(I’m making this up)
(Its in his book “The Great Divorce” though)
(C.S. stands for Clives Staples)
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Substacks are the new crypto
(I have no idea what this means)
and not a single bit of news in sight. I like the way how all of his links are just links to his twitter account talking about things