Ran Prieur

"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."

- Terence McKenna

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April 13. Can civilisation reboot without fossil fuels? This is an important question, and I'd like to see more than just this one guy trying to answer it. His answer is that the most realistic source of energy would be charcoal and wood gas, but that wood power would be heavily constrained by competition with agriculture.

I think the most likely scenario is that solar power is able to adapt and survive through the coming resource bottleneck, and eventually it will grow to surpass the energy we're now getting from fossil fuels. Then, if the most powerful nations have stable zero growth economies, we've got utopia, but I don't expect humanity to learn that fast. Probably there will be solar empires, still addicted to growth and all fighting each other, and we'll eventually hit peak solar, in which it takes more and more effort to harvest the last few photons. Then we'll either finally figure out how to live without growth, or we'll get another crash.

Loosely related: a short video posted to the subreddit about Max Weber and the Protestant Ethic, arguing that religion used to be about staying out of the economic rat race, but that all changed when Calvinism tied salvation to material success.


April 10. Another slow week, or maybe my attention is just going to stuff that wouldn't be good to blog about. Here's something fun for the weekend: GeoGuessr is a browser game that shows you a random Google street view and you try to guess where it is on a map.


April 8. Unrelated stuff. The Failed Promise of Deep Links is a smart article about how the internet could be used for exciting new ways of communicating, but in practice it keeps sliding into behavior that is boring, annoying, and profitable. I knew the old definition of "deep links" but I didn't know there's a completely new definition and the old definition is being forgotten.

13 Reasons Rain Dove Is The Androgynous Model Of Your Dreams. This is a surprisingly good article about a female model who looks like a man. The last paragraph:

"I want to be boring. I would like people like me, in the future, to not be shocking. I want to be good at what I do, but I just want people to look and think, OK. When a man wears a dress it shouldn't be shocking; you shouldn't look twice unless you're thinking, Nice dress!"

Consistency and discipline over motivation. Most psychological skills get easier as I get older, but motivation remains as hard as ever. This guy argues that, instead of trying or waiting to feel motivated, it's better to just devote blocks of time where you force yourself to do stuff you don't feel like doing, and this is easier if you start each session with mental planning.

This is definitely the right way to do your taxes, but if we're talking about creative work, I think it should be considered in balance with the opposite position: that if your vision isn't lighting a fire under your ass, you need to reach deeper inside yourself until you find one that does.


April 6. Some technology links. Drone startup wants to plant one billion trees a year. The survival rate will probably be worse than hand-planting, but it should get better, and it's already cheaper than hand-planting on a large scale. Imagine if a trickster did this with drug-bearing plants, or a controversial opportunist plant like kudzu or autumn olive.

Another drone story from last fall: Flag-carrying drone sparks violence at soccer match. Whoever planned this, it must have been like scoring on an unguarded goal. The sequence of events is so predictable that it makes me amused at humanity.

Another link from 2014, Violent video games don't make you aggressive - difficult games do. And if a difficult game can make us aggressive, how much more aggressive do we get when life itself is too difficult?

The End of Farming is about lab-grown animal products. Lab-grown meat is still much worse than farmed meat in both taste and efficiency, but milk is getting close. I'm also thinking, even if lab-grown food can surpass farmed food, it still needs a tech infrastructure. Old-fashioned animal grazing is more robust and will survive in areas that are technologically unstable or off-grid.


April 4. Yesterday I couldn't write about music because my newest ideas are only half-baked, and I couldn't write about marijuana and fatigue because my self-experimentation is still inconclusive. But here's a small drugs link from the Psychonaut subreddit, Weed, is it useful after a point? By which they mean, is it much less useful after you've done other psychoactive drugs?

And a small music link. I've been looking for months for a band that sounds even slightly like my favorite band, Big Blood, and I finally found one. They're called Silver Summit. But other than the song Child, they don't do much for me. This is why most of us have trouble answering the question, "What kind of music do you like?" Because our ear for beauty goes deeper than our mind for language.


April 1. It's a slow week so I'm going to keep writing about music. There's a thoughtful thread on the subreddit, New Music Suckage. The OP, doubticksy, suggests that there is less Great music now than in the golden age of classic rock. I don't exactly agree with this, but it's the natural place to start a discussion of how music has changed over the last few decades, and I hope nobody downvoted the whole thread just because they didn't like where it started.

I wrote a long comment arguing that musical quality depends on context, and that the explosion of creativity in the 60's and 70's came from a unique convergence of social and technological factors. Of my three speculations at the end, I think #2 and #3 are only slightly true and #1 doesn't go far enough: overall there is more musical creativity now. Of course you can't hear it on the radio, and it doesn't seem to be driving cultural changes, but check out this new project, Every Noise at Once. It's a map of more than 1300 musical genres, loosely sorted on a grid of organic vs electric and atmospheric vs bouncy, and if you click beside any genre you go to another map of hundreds of artists. Then if you have a Spotify account you can click on "list" and get a playlist, or click on any artist and hear a sample song. I don't have Spotify so I just open a YouTube tab and copy names into the search box. Yesterday I spent more than an hour exploring a tiny corner of the New Weird America genre.

I changed my mind about what I said yesterday: it does not require a lot of free time to find your favorite music. Because whether you're in 1975 listening to the world's best DJ, or in 2015 listening to some internet playlist, it takes the same five minutes to hear a five minute song, and you can play it in the background while you're doing other stuff. The difference is, now you have to spend more time listening to music you don't like, so it's a matter of patience.

Sort of going back to the original subject, a reader pointed me to this BBC documentary about Hawkwind, and it really gives a sense of how exciting those times were.


March 30. The last Monday of every month is Finger Pointing Day. I'm getting more selective about negative links, so today I only have three and they're all either smart or funny. This long reddit thread is funny: Have you ever gotten to the 'romantic' subplot of a fantasy or science fiction book and realized that the author has probably never talked to a girl romantically?

Why hydrogen fuel cell cars don't work. The author knows a lot about the subject and goes into great detail about why, in practical terms, batteries beat fuel cells in every way.

Why Do All Records Sound the Same? Because audio processing technology is now powerful enough that producers and record companies can polish music to death. I would add: at the same time, home recording technology and internet distribution are making it easier than ever for artists to avoid the big money industry and make great music on their own terms. The problem with this system is that it's elitist: because the best music is obscure, you can only find it if you have lots of free time.


March 27. Bunch o' links. Two engineering students have figured out how to put fires out with low frequency sound.

Replace Soy with Mealworms as a Protein-Rich Animal Feed Supplement. I think humans are going to have to eat lots of insects to make it through this century without a global famine.

Brand new subreddit, Psych Ward Chronicles. It was started just yesterday, inspired by this AskReddit thread, You have to say one sentence to prove you are insane, which someone answered with a jaw-dropping sentence said by an actual crazy person: "Stare into the sun and tell me if eternity is still there."

Related: Psychonaut is a popular subreddit where people talk about psychedelic experiences and related philosophy.

I've been looking for a weather site that has good information and loads quickly, and I've started using the one at timeanddate.com. Here's the Spokane extended forecast and if you like it you can find your local forecast with the search box.

How to generate an encryption passphrase that even the NSA can't guess. Using a resource called the Diceware word list, you roll dice to come up with seven random words and memorize them.

And an inspiring article about the human potential, The Impossible Physiology of the Free Diver.


March 25. Edited reader comment on Monday's genetic engineering link:

CRISPR is indeed revolutionary in that it enables rapid and efficient genetic manipulation in a wide range of species. However, the notion that CRISPR will result in escape of GMOs from labs is a completely separate question.

Their example, the fruit fly, can itself provide evidence to the contrary. Because of how easy genetic manipulation is in the fruit fly, nearly every gene has already been deleted, and all known markers and tools inserted, in labs for decades all over the globe. Yet despite their small size and wings to fly out of labs, the world is not yet overrun by GM fruit flies.

The reason is simple: evolution gives wild fruit flies the greatest advantage, with an elegant and robust unmodified genome selected over millions of years to function in the world. Nearly all genetic manipulations confer disadvantages that are out-competed by wild flies.

New subject: this excellent reddit comment explains why whole milk is better than lowfat milk, including a calorie to lactose ratio that enables most lactose intolerant people to consume whole milk in moderation.


March 23. Some technology links. Let's talk about designer wild critters, not designer babies.

In a paper published yesterday, Valentino Gantz and Ethan Bier, both at the University of California, San Diego, demonstrated the first successful implementation of a CRISPR-Cas9-based gene drive in the germ line of fruit flies. The CRISPR gene drive is a powerful piece of technology that all but guarantees an engineered trait is passed on to every single offspring. Within months or years, it has the ability to alter an entire population of a sexually reproducing species.
...
Modified critters could easily escape, or carefully designed species released into the wild could have unintended consequences, sparking a cascade of ecological changes that may be all but impossible to reverse.

Next, Assembly line nuclear reactors are quietly building steam in the northwest. I actually think this is good. My big objection to nuclear power is political: where the energy flows from the center out, the political power flows from the center out, and the bigger the plant, the bigger the control system. But smaller reactors could be run by towns or neighborhoods in which you're more likely to have a voice, and they could stay autonomous and energy-rich as dysfunctional big systems break down.

Back to scary: What cockroaches with backpacks can do. Mostly it's about surveillance, and I wonder if cockroach cyborgs are a better fit with democratic, distributed surveillance, where anyone can watch anyone, or centralized surveillance where powerful institutions can lock their power in place.

And the other day on the subreddit, yiedyie made a post called The Point of No-Return, "the point at which all daredevils and tricksters instead of jumping over cliffs in squirrel flying suits, making cults, or make cyber-scams, etc, start instead messing with the system."


March 22. Personal update. Here's a six year old photo of me and my truck just after buying it. I paid $2600 and just sold it for $2500. Partly that's because Rangers hold their value, but I also put only 5000 miles per year on it, drove it gently, and sold it with nicer tires. Plus I just spent $300 on new shocks, front rotors, pads, and bearings, all of which were surprisingly easy to replace. I'm sad to see it go, but now that Leigh Ann has a car and I have a scooter, holding onto it wasn't worth the cost of insurance and registration. That means I'll almost never be visiting my land, and anyone who plans to do permaculture can have it for below market value.


March 20. I have nothing much to post for the weekend. Here's a minor good news link, LA City Council approves curbside planting of fruits and vegetables, and a good AskReddit thread, People who have grown up in poverty then managed to get out, what was the biggest culture shock for you?

In personal news, I'm trying to sell my truck, and I still haven't figured out what's causing my fatigue. If it's marijuana, then I'm probably the only person getting bad effects from a gram a month.


March 18. Today, two woo-woo links from readers. No one could see the color blue until modern times. That's not quite true - the article mentions that ancient Egyptians had a word for blue because they had blue dyes. But study of ancient texts suggests that our color vision is largely cultural, and that it has grown through history, with red appearing first and blue last. There's also a modern example of tribal forest people who can distinguish fine shades of green but not the difference between green and blue. I assume we're not finished, and there are potential colors that for now only crazy people can see.

This also reminds me of Augustine of Hippo, who astonished Romans with his magical ability to read without speaking the words out loud. And it reminds me of some speculations from Oliver Sacks books: that we are all born with the potential for synesthesia and musical perfect pitch, but most of us don't develop them because our education goes in another direction.

Oneirosophy is a small subreddit for subjective idealist thinking. It's mostly about occult culture and dream practices, because subjective idealist philosophy is really hard. My everyday default philosophy is objective materialism, that "there is" a single physical reality "out there", because it's a necessary and powerful shortcut. But people who get into paranormal phenomena (or fringe science or conspiracy theory) and go a little crazy, could stay sane if they could let go of the idea that the universe is one way, and imagine it instead as a collective dream that has to be forced into consistency.


March 16. I plan to post lightly this week. Here are two smart blogs by readers, Gabriel Duquette and Benjamin Mahalik.


March 13. The previous post was for readers, and this post is for me. Last month my favorite band, Big Blood, posted a new double album to their free music archive page. This is how prolific they are: their previous album, Unlikely Mothers, was also double length and came out only last June. And this is how they avoid popularity: the best original songs on the new album (New Plan, Go See Boats, Magnetic Green, Time Stands Still) are discreetly lurking on Double Days II, all four finish with sounds that even I don't like, and Double Days I is entirely weird experiments and covers. My favorite on DDI is this cover of Black Sabbath's Planet Caravan.

My favorite on DDII has lyrics based on something their kid said at the ocean, and it occurs to me that this is a good metaphor for the creative process: it's like you have a kid inside you, and you have to 1) make her feel comfortable chattering, 2) listen, and 3) edit it into something good. (Which authors are good at one or two of those things but not all three?) Anyway, I often link to music that younger listeners will like better than older listeners, but if the vocals aren't too strange for you, this is a beautiful folk song that should sound better if you're over 50 than under 30: Big Blood - Go See Boats.


March 11. Today, some intellectual heavy lifting. A week ago Sarah Perry made a new post on Ribbonfarm, Gardens Need Walls: On Boundaries, Ritual, and Beauty. It's so dense with new ideas that it's taken me a week just to wrap my head around it. These are the main points:

1) Good systems are made of many subsystems with boundaries. This enables more diversity and it's much easier to solve problems. Examples would be bodies made of many cells, islands with different ecologies, technological systems built out of modules, and human societies made of many tribes or neighborhoods.

2) The march of civilization has destroyed boundaries and subsystems in order to build one giant system, and this is a bad thing. This is why "the system" is so clunky, so unsatisfying, and why we have no power. The metaphor here is mountain climbers roped together. If one falls, they all fall; but we're like billions of mountain climbers who, because of that danger, are not permitted to move at all, but remain stuck in mediocrity.

3) Ancestral cultures are more elegant and beautiful than modern culture because they are small enough that individual humans influence them, and also because they are constrained by rules. An example would be children who learn to play music together on instruments that force them to all play in the same key.

For another view of what's gone wrong with modernity, check out this David Graeber interview about his new book, The Utopia of Rules. It seems, as a system gets larger, that the rules necessary to make it work become more ugly and messy. Graeber's most interesting idea is that bureaucracy is the inevitable result of the "free market", by which we mean a culture of disconnection and selfishness:

The market is supposed to work on grounds of pure competition. Nobody has moral ties to each other other than to obey the rules. But, on the other hand, people are supposed to do anything they can to get as much as possible off the other guy - but won't simply steal the stuff or shoot the person.

Historically, that's just silly; if you don't care at all about a guy, you might as well steal his stuff. In fact, they're encouraging people to act essentially how most human societies, historically, treated their enemies - but to still never resort to violence, trickery or theft. Obviously that's not going to happen. You can only do that if you set up a very strictly enforced police force.

Also related to this subject, math professor Steven Strogatz on the dangers of Too Much Coupling:

"Coupling" refers to the ability of one part of a complex system to influence another... In all sorts of complex systems, this is the general trend: increasing the coupling between the parts seems harmless enough at first. But then, abruptly, when the coupling crosses a critical value, everything changes... With our cell phones and GPS trackers and social media, with globalization, with the coming Internet of things, we're becoming more tightly connected than ever... But the math suggests that increasing coupling is a siren's song. Too much makes a complex system brittle.

I think he's wrong, but only because the core of the system is completely insulated from the choices of ordinary people. The tragedy is that a large system with no boundaries has to be designed that way. If somehow we all had real power, it would collapse overnight. But it's possible to build a big system out of many "cells". Within your cell, you have power and your life has meaning. And your cell is linked to other cells and has power within a larger system, and that system has power within a still larger system. In the whole system, political power could be almost completely bottom-up, we could smoothly adapt to change, and the connections would not reach the density to make it unstable.

I don't have a roadmap of how to get there from here, but I think total collapse of the present system, as exciting as it feels, is a bad idea. It reminds me of a quote whose source I forget: "It takes 20 years to become enlightened, or if you really push it, 30 years."


March 9. So a reader, Dan, is friends with the guy who writes the War Nerd columns under the name Gary Brecher. He tells me that Brecher is working on a new illustrated version of the Iliad, and is looking for an illustrator in a graphic novel or comic book style. The book will be mostly text with an illustration every couple of pages. If anyone is interested, email danrlarsson@gmail.com.





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