My pandemic impatience is not as bad anymore as it was a few weeks ago. I am hearing of more and more people I know getting vaccinated and I am happy for them. They should restart their lives and not listen too much to those who revel in admonishing people to keep up with the precautions as if the risk had not been drastically reduced.
XKCD's comic on how the nRNA vaccine works is fantastic, by the way. He has a whole series on the pandemic, all quite witty: 1 2 3 4 5 6
I almost just went to bed for some reading* when I caught it just in time that I had not blogged yet today. A catastrophe it would certainly not have been, but I like to keep the streak alive for now, however trivial the post turns out to be.
It is funny to observe the own mind in caring about such trivial things like streaks, points or badges, in whatever gamified context they appear. Will it rebel eventually, when one part of the brain gets tricked by another part, in this case me trying to consciously exploit some built-in mechanism for motivational gains? Probably not, the automatic "primitive" bits are not aware of context.
Viewing one's own mind not as a single unified entity, but a mess of different motivations, feelings and thoughts, often conflicting ones, can be helpful and generally rings true to me. You can make up a theory of willpower this way, or call out the "internal press sectretary" that tries to weave a flattering story out of the underlying mess, as Simler & Hanson describe in The Elephant in the Brain.
Not very pretty to look at up close, what these brains of ours are up to.
(* still the LessWrong books and a new one on the Viking age, called River Kings.)
No better way to spend a rainy Sunday than to make full use of the kitchen. Bottling the last batch of beer and brewing a new (split) batch takes the better part of the day, but everything went smooth today and I was done by 4pm, including the cleaning of all equipent and the kitchen itself.
I was reusing the yeast from last week, this time for a Pale Ale with lots of fruity hops: Simcoe, Mosaic, Citra, you name it. And part of the batch became a single-hop with HBC 692 which I had not used before.
We own a small patch of forest and had to take down a piece of it because of the bark beetle outbreak that has been causing large problems in recent years. So now it is time to make sure that the new generation of trees gets off ot a good start there.
While we're waiting for a delivery of 4000 saplings, I spent the morning to plant the ones that we grew ourselves in the garden last year. They promise rain for tomorrow.
This recent 80,000 hours podcast is a great listen! Fascinating stories on how they secured nuclear material from former Soviet states, and a perspective on weapons of mass destruction that one does not hear very often.
Just a small excerpt:
North Korea has an advanced biological weapons program. What worries me about North Korea is they’re more likely to use biological weapons than nuclear weapons, because if they used a nuclear weapon, it’s over, right? If they used a biological weapon and delivered it covertly through secret operatives, anywhere in the world… In Malaysia, where they used VX against a Kim Jong-un’s brother in a successful assassination attempt. Now that was a chemical weapon, but wherever North Koreans have a diplomatic presence, they could launch biological weapons attacks covertly. And in a way, perhaps that’s a little bit deniable, maybe they would never get caught for doing it. So I think they’re more likely to do that than to use a nuclear weapon, which would have a home address.
I am going back and forth in my thinking on whether cryptocurrencies are a fraud. Of course there are obvious scams in this area that try to directly lure people out of their money; those are not what I wonder about, but the digital currencies themselves.
There have been frequent reports of market manipulations over the years and the whole setup looks like a pyramid scheme where the early "investors" get rich at the expense of the late suckers. Plus, some of the prominent people do, while certainly being brilliant, come across as charlatans. Fun to read and often insightful, sure, but I cannot shake that vague feeling that something is off.
On the other hand, cryptocurrencies have been around for while now and not collapsed yet, in spite of the occasional scandals. And where the line between "pyramid scheme" and "positive-sum game" should be drawn, is not clear to me. The whole economy has made humanity so much better-off since growth convinced people that the cake is getting bigger and that things can get better for everyone, in contrast to a zero-sum situation.
So maybe Bitcoin and the like will stay around, and we have to get used to that. To the moon!
(And as a side note: Whenever someone argues for a blockchain to be used anywhere else than cryptocurrencies, feel free to roll your eyes and laugh them out of the room.)
This blog holds no world-shattering insights. I don't have something interesting to say every day (ever?), but the point is to write it down anyway. Just in case a good thought comes by eventually, then the routines are in place to capture it.
But the blog spammers have rediscovered the comment fields, so there's that.
The question of personal identity is a tricky one and philosophers have argued about it for a long time, considering the Ship of Theseus and other analogies in that context.
One way to frame it is to think about past and future selves. Putting it this way is biased in the sense that it implies that these are not the same as the current self, thereby foregoing the conclusion. But it allows to ask questions like
How strongly do you identify with your past self?
or
How well do you treat your future self?
which can be quite helpful mental tools.
The secion on exactly this subject was what I found most intersting in the chat between Simone Collins and Spencer Greenberg that I listened to the other day. They talk about much more than this and at times it is quite funny (the good kind of funny).
Plus, they mention FutureMe, a site for writing letters to one's future self - what a wonderful idea!
It's been a while but today I brewed a new batch of beer, my 57th. A wheat beer, not quite according to any of the well-known German or Belgian styles, but just the way I like it. I hope, at least, since one never knows exactly how it will turn out until the first tasting, after fermentation and carbonation are done.
If you are into the details, the grist is 56% Pilsner malt, 34% wheat, 10% Munich and a smidge CaraAmber. Hops are Nothern Brewer, East Kent Goldings and a very small late addition of Citra. Yeast is Lallemand's "Munich Classic" which is the same as Wy3068, the most common wheat beer strain, and it well deserves this place. Originally I thought I would add some sugar later on, to bring it in the vicinity of Grosse Bertha, but I think I won't. I prefer weaker easy-to-drink beers, especially since this one is meant for the summer.
