RIP, Lutz Kayser.
I don’t know if anyone’s written a definitive history of OTRAG, but it did inspire (at least for a while) John Carmack and Armadillo.
Reversing Aging
A long but interesting interview with George Church:
Certainly if you could fix all nine hallmarks at once that would do well. Reversal of aging has been demonstrated in simple animals. Some people will dismiss those as too simple — because they have such a short life already, it’s not surprising you can make them live longer. But I think it’s quite clear that aging is programmed in some sense. It’s not like you’ve been programmed to die at some age, but the laziness of evolution has resulted in your program to not avoid dying.
Over evolutionary time, to use analogy, it was not cost effective to invest a lot of your precious food to live longer because you’re going to get eaten by a wolf anyway. Now we have plenty of excess food, and rather than becoming obese let’s spend that on living longer, by spending extra ATP on repair and rejuvenation. That’s something 20-year-olds do fine, but after 60 you stop investing quite as well.
Yes. There has been no evolutionary pressure for us to live longer, but it’s absurd to think it would violate any laws of physics (and ultimately, even biology comes down to physics) that prevent us from living indefinitely long lives. And how soon could it happen?
The simple answer is, I don’t know. Probably we’ll see the first dog trials in the next year or two. If that works, human trials are another two years away, and eight years before they’re done. Once you get a few going and succeeding it’s a positive feedback loop.
That’s pretty exciting, but still: faster, please.
But I did come across this:
If you find that in the western world we’re eating a lot of marbled cow that didn’t exist in the ancient days, all you have to do is get rid of the marbled cow and you’re all set.
Except I’m not aware of any scientific evidence that marbled cow is a problem. I wonder how up on nutrition he is?
When People Are Questioning Your Sacred Cows
…as I attempted to explain why this story looks weak to a lot of journalists (I was not the only one who noticed the thin sourcing), I began to understand why I’d triggered such outrage. Because several people asked me some version of the same question: “Why would you even question this story?” In their minds, it was clear that there could be only one reason: because I was trying to somehow salvage Moore’s candidacy.
I get asked this question a lot these days. Why would you even argue about rape statistics, when we know that rape is a problem? Why would you give even a moment’s consideration to those who theorize that global warming could be moderate rather than catastrophic? Why would you raise questions about that terrible gang rape at UVA?
My interlocutors have a point: We all make choices about which assertions we interrogate, and which we accept on easy faith. And because we are biased, we tend to interrogate most ruthlessly the inconvenient claims that stand in the way of something we’d very much like to believe. When someone casts doubt on a politically charged story, it’s not crazy to infer an ulterior ideological motive (even though in this particular case involving my qualms about that Roy Moore mall story, this inference was dead wrong).
But if we are committed to believing only things that are likely to be true, then how much does the motive of a questioner really matter? I’d argue “not much.” Knowing someone’s political commitments tells you that they are likely to accept evidence for some propositions more easily than for others. But it does not tell you that their analysis is wrong.
This is reminiscent of the other day when, in having the temerity to point out, horrible a human being as Roy Moore is, that there was no available evidence that he was an actual pedophile, I was accused of “defending” him, or being a pedophile myself.
Dreamchaser
Eric Berger has the video of the landing test.
The big deal about this is its potential for an ambulance from orbit, with its lower entry acceleration, and ability to land near a hospital. It will be a very useful capability.
Milspace
DARPA wants to disrupt it. It could certainly use it.
The Tesla Truck
Not sure if it would be worth the effort to drive over to Hawthorne for it. Short drive, but I don’t have any press privileges for it. I suppose I could ask John Taylor.
How Long Should We Live?
A video that lays bare our irrational acceptance of the reaper.
Speaking of which, Aubrey de Grey gave a great luncheon talk in Austin on Saturday. He wants to live as long as he wants to live, and he thinks that people who want to go into space are crazy, because it’s too risky.
3-D Printed Metal Parts
They’re getting better:
The new device reflects a wave of rapid progress in metal 3-D printing, suggesting that the technology is moving toward becoming a more realistic manufacturing tool. Last month, researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced they had developed a new method that created stainless-steel parts three times as strong as any previous 3-D-printed steel parts. That means mission-critical parts can be created using 3-D printing without worries about compromising structural integrity. Startup Desktop Metal, meanwhile, is helping to overcome the speed barrier. Its production machine, available for purchase next year, makes metal parts 100 times faster than a laser-based 3-D printer.
Cool.
Hey, Millennials
“Communism sucks. I know, because I lived it.”
That half of a generation would prefer to live under socialism or communism to a free-market economy is an appalling failure of our educational system. Though, from the point of view of those who have been running it (into the ground), perhaps they consider it a success.
Millennials’ “Education”
The hard lifting of undoing it:
One of the falsehoods that has been stuffed into your brain and pounded into place is that moral knowledge progresses inevitably, such that later generations are morally and intellectually superior to earlier generations, and that the older the source the more morally suspect that source is. There is a term for that. It is called chronological snobbery. Or, to use a term that you might understand more easily, “ageism.”
Second, you have been taught to resort to two moral values above all others, diversity and equality. These are important values if properly understood. But the way most of you have been taught to understand them makes you irrational, unreasoning. For you have been taught that we must have as much diversity as possible and that equality means that everyone must be made equal. But equal simply means the same. To say that 2+2 equals 4 is to say that 2+2 is numerically the same as four. And diversity simply means difference. So when you say that we should have diversity and equality you are saying we should have difference and sameness. That is incoherent, by itself. Two things cannot be different and the same at the same time in the same way.
Furthermore, diversity and equality are not the most important values. In fact, neither diversity nor equality is valuable at all in its own right. Some diversity is bad. For example, if slavery is inherently wrong, as I suspect we all think it is, then a diversity of views about the morality of slavery is worse than complete agreement that slavery is wrong.
Similarly, equality is not to be desired for its own sake. Nobody is equal in all respects. We are all different, which is to say that we are all not the same, which is to say that we are unequal in many ways. And that is generally a good thing. But it is not always a good thing (see the previous remarks about diversity).
Related to this: You do you not know what the word “fair” means. It does not just mean equality. Nor does it mean something you do not like. For now, you will have to take my word for this. But we will examine fairness from time to time throughout this semester.
Read all.