December 6. Reality shifting: psychological features of an emergent online daydreaming culture.
RS, described as the experience of being able to transcend one's physical confines and visit alternate, mostly fictional, universes, is discussed by many on Internet platforms.... The experience of shifting is reportedly facilitated by specific induction methods involving relaxation, concentration of attention, and autosuggestion. Some practitioners report a strong sense of presence in their desired realities, reified by some who believe in the concrete reality of the alternate world they shift to.
Obviously these worlds aren't real, but it's interesting that there is a cultural trend of more intensive imagination. It's anyone's guess if this is a dead end, or if it's leading somewhere.
Related: a smart blog post from 2017, Reality has a surprising amount of detail. The same thing struck me after playing on the Oculus and then taking the garbage out. In VR, there's a limit to how deep you can zoom before you get to one pixel. In reality -- and you could even use this as a definition of reality -- no matter how deep you zoom, there's always more. That's why physicists will never find a final particle or a grand unifying theory.
December 9. Smart article on decline, America Is Running on Fumes. (alternate paywall workaround)
There's lots of stuff about the decrease in new ideas, why it's happening, and how to fix it. But my favorite part is about all the changes at the end of the 19th century:
Imagine going to sleep in 1875 in New York City and waking up 25 years later. As you shut your eyes, there is no electric lighting. There are no cars on the road. Telephones are rare. There is no such thing as Coca-Cola, or sneakers, or basketball, or aspirin. The tallest building in Manhattan is a church.
...
A quarter-century hibernation today would mean dozing off in 1996 and waking up in 2021... Compare "cars have replaced horses as the best way to get across town" with "apps have replaced phones as the best way to order takeout."
I think this is unfair, but it's also a really powerful idea, to look for 25 year periods where one kind of thing changed a lot. If you're lgbt, you'd probably rather have the cultural changes from 1990-2015 than the technological changes from 1875-1900.
Or consider all the cultural inventions and openings from 1960-1985. If I could time travel to 1875, I'd rather have that upgrade, than the upgrade that actually happened. A world with punk rock and horses sounds pretty cool.
Of course, the tech changes were necessary for the cultural changes. The music of the 1960's required fully distributed phonographs and radios. And yet, phonographs and radios were around for decades before they drove a renaissance. So I'm wondering, what things have already been invented, that are still waiting for their golden age?
December 18. Wolves make roadways safer, generating large economic returns to predator conservation. Related, from a Reddit comment in a thread about quicksand:
Wolves. Never a threat. Often encountered them doing field research in the Canadian wilderness. We could walk right through the middle of a pack. They'd trot over to our camp, lay down and just stare with a mild curiosity. Sometimes they'd have a bit of blood on their faces where it had been deep in a carcass but zero aggression towards us. Their cubs would play with anything dangling. After a while the pack would get up and just trot off as if 'nothing interesting here.'