From pharos at gmail.com Mon Aug 3 12:20:47 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 3 Aug 2015 13:20:47 +0100 Subject: [ExI] META: Software - MS Visual Studio 2015 CE now available free Message-ID: Individual users have no restrictions and can develop commercial apps freely, but organizations and enterprises are limited to use "in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects." The installer for the free Community edition includes support for a few key open source development stacks provided by third parties. For example, the Python 3.4 stack has sample projects for the Bottle, Django, and Flask Web frameworks, as well as a template for a blank Azure cloud service. Android (and iOS) development tools are also available out of the box, along with JavaScript. Download from here: BillK From atymes at gmail.com Mon Aug 3 17:09:06 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Mon, 3 Aug 2015 10:09:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] META: Software - MS Visual Studio 2015 CE now available free In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Free is too expensive for MS Visual anything. Insert standard warnings against using it for any project you care about if you have any other reasonable option. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Tue Aug 11 22:28:02 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2015 23:28:02 +0100 Subject: [ExI] The Universe is disappearing Message-ID: Sad news. Quote: Today's galaxies are only producing half as much energy as galaxies were two billion years ago, says the project's head Simon Driver of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Western Australia. "What we're seeing is that at every single wavelength, the amount of energy being generated today is almost a factor of two less than the amount of energy that was generated two billion years ago," says Driver. "That tells us that the universe is essentially dying. It's now fading and dwindling and diminishing, and that result is robust regardless of whether dark energy or dark matter is right or wrong, it doesn't depend on any cosmological model." The researchers calculate the oldest lowest mass stars, which burn through their fuel very slowly, should keep shining for about another 100 billion years. "So it's rather bleak I'm afraid," says Driver. "The Universe will decline from here on in, sliding gently into old age. The Universe has basically sat down on the sofa, pulled up a blanket and is about to nod off for an eternal doze,? concludes Simon Driver. ------------------ And if you add in the expansion of the universe, only about 3% (three!) of the galaxies we can see now can ever be reached by us, even travelling at the speed of light. Quote: While no galaxy has literally disappeared to the point where it?s invisible, 97% of them have disappeared in the sense that they?re unreachable to us, and that the light they?re emitting today will never reach us. The galaxies are still visible, but only due to their old light. -------------------- So future generations have two problems -- 1) How to get the universe restarted. 2) Space travel greater than light speed if we want to leave our galaxy. (Although one galaxy should be enough for anyone!). That reminds me of the Bill Gates comment that 640K should be enough memory for anyone. :) BillK From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Aug 11 22:42:55 2015 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan) Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2015 15:42:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] The Universe is disappearing In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <9CA1D83D-932D-4DFE-8F2A-BC8D515F05F5@gmail.com> Reports of the dying of the universe have been greatly exaggerated, IMO. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books via: http://www.amazon.com/Dan-Ust/e/B00J6HPX8M/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Aug 12 01:15:54 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2015 21:15:54 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Wow! Message-ID: I just thought I would share this with my friends on Exi: After 12 years of effort my company today signed our first large deal. We have now a licensing agreement with a large pharma company to do a huge amount of work that should result in a number of distinct drugs to be brought to market in the next few years, all based on ideas that originated in our company. Considering that we are still a tiny, 10-person biotech, this is amazing and we are very excited to work on bringing our inventions from the lab to the bedside! The drugs will target mitochondria in novel ways and should give us the ability to very effectively target a range of diseases with substantially fewer side effects compared to existing drugs. They will be awesome :) Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gsantostasi at gmail.com Wed Aug 12 01:42:44 2015 From: gsantostasi at gmail.com (Giovanni Santostasi) Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2015 20:42:44 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Wow! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Congratulation Rafal ! Giovanni On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 8:15 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki < rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote: > I just thought I would share this with my friends on Exi: > > After 12 years of effort my company today signed our first large deal. We > have now a licensing agreement with a large pharma company to do a huge > amount of work that should result in a number of distinct drugs to be > brought to market in the next few years, all based on ideas that originated > in our company. Considering that we are still a tiny, 10-person biotech, > this is amazing and we are very excited to work on bringing our inventions > from the lab to the bedside! > > The drugs will target mitochondria in novel ways and should give us the > ability to very effectively target a range of diseases with substantially > fewer side effects compared to existing drugs. They will be awesome :) > > Rafal > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Aug 12 01:48:29 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2015 18:48:29 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Wow! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <00b601d0d4a1$006f1f10$014d5d30$@att.net> From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki Sent: Tuesday, August 11, 2015 6:16 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: [ExI] Wow! >?After 12 years of effort my company today signed our first large deal. ?They will be awesome :) Rafal Cool! Rafal, just remember, we were friends of you *before* you started making a big success of yourself. That will help keep you humble. {8-] spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From csaucier at sovacs.com Wed Aug 12 01:39:23 2015 From: csaucier at sovacs.com (Christian Saucier) Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2015 21:39:23 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Wow! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Congratulations Rafal! And thank you for helping bring new safer drugs to the market! C. On August 11, 2015 9:15:54 PM EDT, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: >I just thought I would share this with my friends on Exi: > >After 12 years of effort my company today signed our first large deal. >We >have now a licensing agreement with a large pharma company to do a huge >amount of work that should result in a number of distinct drugs to be >brought to market in the next few years, all based on ideas that >originated >in our company. Considering that we are still a tiny, 10-person >biotech, >this is amazing and we are very excited to work on bringing our >inventions >from the lab to the bedside! > >The drugs will target mitochondria in novel ways and should give us the >ability to very effectively target a range of diseases with >substantially >fewer side effects compared to existing drugs. They will be awesome :) > >Rafal > > >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >_______________________________________________ >extropy-chat mailing list >extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giulio at gmail.com Wed Aug 12 05:01:42 2015 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2015 07:01:42 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Wow! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Congratulations Rafal! On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 3:15 AM, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > I just thought I would share this with my friends on Exi: > > After 12 years of effort my company today signed our first large deal. We > have now a licensing agreement with a large pharma company to do a huge > amount of work that should result in a number of distinct drugs to be > brought to market in the next few years, all based on ideas that originated > in our company. Considering that we are still a tiny, 10-person biotech, > this is amazing and we are very excited to work on bringing our inventions > from the lab to the bedside! > > The drugs will target mitochondria in novel ways and should give us the > ability to very effectively target a range of diseases with substantially > fewer side effects compared to existing drugs. They will be awesome :) > > Rafal > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > From protokol2020 at gmail.com Wed Aug 12 05:05:57 2015 From: protokol2020 at gmail.com (Tomaz Kristan) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2015 07:05:57 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Wow! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Well, this is something! I love to see advances. Congratulations! On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 3:39 AM, Christian Saucier wrote: > Congratulations Rafal! And thank you for helping bring new safer drugs to > the market! > > C. > > On August 11, 2015 9:15:54 PM EDT, Rafal Smigrodzki < > rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote: > >> I just thought I would share this with my friends on Exi: >> >> After 12 years of effort my company today signed our first large deal. We >> have now a licensing agreement with a large pharma company to do a huge >> amount of work that should result in a number of distinct drugs to be >> brought to market in the next few years, all based on ideas that originated >> in our company. Considering that we are still a tiny, 10-person biotech, >> this is amazing and we are very excited to work on bringing our inventions >> from the lab to the bedside! >> >> The drugs will target mitochondria in novel ways and should give us the >> ability to very effectively target a range of diseases with substantially >> fewer side effects compared to existing drugs. They will be awesome :) >> >> Rafal >> >> ------------------------------ >> >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> >> > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -- https://protokol2020.wordpress.com/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giulio at gmail.com Wed Aug 12 06:04:08 2015 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2015 08:04:08 +0200 Subject: [ExI] The Universe is disappearing In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 12:28 AM, BillK wrote: > So future generations have two problems -- > > 1) How to get the universe restarted. > > 2) Space travel greater than light speed if we want to leave our galaxy. > (Although one galaxy should be enough for anyone!). That's the right attitude! > > That reminds me of the Bill Gates comment that 640K should be enough > memory for anyone. :) > > > BillK > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From atymes at gmail.com Wed Aug 12 06:05:41 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 11 Aug 2015 23:05:41 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Wow! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 6:15 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki < rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote: > > After 12 years of effort my company today signed our first large deal. We > have now a licensing agreement with a large pharma company to do a huge > amount of work that should result in a number of distinct drugs to be > brought to market in the next few years, all based on ideas that originated > in our company. Considering that we are still a tiny, 10-person biotech, > this is amazing and we are very excited to work on bringing our inventions > from the lab to the bedside! > 'Grats. Too bad it took 12 years, though. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Wed Aug 12 07:01:23 2015 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2015 00:01:23 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Wow! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Congratulations! Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books via: http://www.amazon.com/Dan-Ust/e/B00J6HPX8M/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Wed Aug 12 13:02:11 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2015 15:02:11 +0200 Subject: [ExI] The Universe is disappearing In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <570487332-29918@secure.ericade.net> (Seems my original post got eaten by entropy; here is a repost) The media are reporting it as evidence of the End of the Universe or the imminent heat death: http://news.discovery.com/space/galaxies/universe-is-dying-galactic-survey-shows-150810.htm http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.02076 Basically, the energy production is going down. This is unsurprising to anybody keeping up with star formation trends (http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.3436). There is also a common view that planet formation peaked way back, leaving Earth as one of the later planets (still, there is a possibility that because of gas infall there will be enough of a long tail of future planet formation that makes us early anyway: http://arxiv.org/abs/1508.01202 ). Still, I wonder if this isn't good news for us intelligent creatures, for three reasons: First, high star formation also means high supernova and GRB rates; as Cirkovic et al have argued, this might even have precluded the formation of intelligent life until recently (and some people think it causes a galactic habitable zone). Second, a lot of stellar energy doesn't mean a lot of lifezones: the lifezone radius and width scales as the square root of the luminosity, making it scale as mass to the power 1.75. But the lifespan of a star scales as mass^-2.5, so the total "width-years" scales as mass^-0.75 - we get more space and time for life among low-mass stars. Since lighter stars are more common than heavier (along some power law distribution), we can conclude that while luminosity often gets dominated by the young bluewhite stars most of the habitability is produced among the dimmer ones (also, see http://www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6210/732 - there may be a lot of ejected dim stars between galaxies). Since the dim ones last long, the total amount of lifezone may be going up. Third, it also means that less matter is burned into unusable radiation before we can get to it and use it to produce life, intelligence and complexity. The radiation losses are not that large if we can convert matter directly into energy (a few percent tops), but if there is a tech ceiling limiting us to fusion (direct or through Dyson shells) then we may want to avoid having the stars go out too quickly. Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Wed Aug 12 13:04:01 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2015 15:04:01 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Wow! In-Reply-To: Message-ID: <570597836-29914@secure.ericade.net> Congratulations! What diseases are you aiming at? Besides ageing. Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mail at harveynewstrom.com Wed Aug 12 13:43:26 2015 From: mail at harveynewstrom.com (Harvey Newstrom) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2015 09:43:26 -0400 Subject: [ExI] The Universe is disappearing In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <004101d0d504$decc97c0$9c65c740$@harveynewstrom.com> BillK wrote: > (Although one galaxy should be enough for anyone!). Maybe we should start sequestration now, since we've already lost half our property value. -- Harvey Newstrom www.HarveyNewstrom.com From mail at harveynewstrom.com Wed Aug 12 13:40:11 2015 From: mail at harveynewstrom.com (Harvey Newstrom) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2015 09:40:11 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Wow! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <004001d0d504$696f6d40$3c4e47c0$@harveynewstrom.com> Wonderful news for mitochondria everywhere! -- Harvey Newstrom www.HarveyNewstrom.com From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Aug 12 16:12:32 2015 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2015 12:12:32 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Wow! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: That is great news Rafal, congratulations! John K Clark ========= On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 9:15 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki < rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote: > I just thought I would share this with my friends on Exi: > > After 12 years of effort my company today signed our first large deal. We > have now a licensing agreement with a large pharma company to do a huge > amount of work that should result in a number of distinct drugs to be > brought to market in the next few years, all based on ideas that originated > in our company. Considering that we are still a tiny, 10-person biotech, > this is amazing and we are very excited to work on bringing our inventions > from the lab to the bedside! > > The drugs will target mitochondria in novel ways and should give us the > ability to very effectively target a range of diseases with substantially > fewer side effects compared to existing drugs. They will be awesome :) > > Rafal > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From natasha at natasha.cc Wed Aug 12 16:27:42 2015 From: natasha at natasha.cc (natasha at natasha.cc) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2015 09:27:42 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Wow! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <008a01d0d51b$d12bdb50$738391f0$@natasha.cc> Congratulations on your success! From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki Sent: Tuesday, August 11, 2015 6:16 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: [ExI] Wow! I just thought I would share this with my friends on Exi: After 12 years of effort my company today signed our first large deal. We have now a licensing agreement with a large pharma company to do a huge amount of work that should result in a number of distinct drugs to be brought to market in the next few years, all based on ideas that originated in our company. Considering that we are still a tiny, 10-person biotech, this is amazing and we are very excited to work on bringing our inventions from the lab to the bedside! The drugs will target mitochondria in novel ways and should give us the ability to very effectively target a range of diseases with substantially fewer side effects compared to existing drugs. They will be awesome :) Rafal -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From stathisp at gmail.com Wed Aug 12 19:16:58 2015 From: stathisp at gmail.com (Stathis Papaioannou) Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2015 05:16:58 +1000 Subject: [ExI] Wow! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Wednesday, August 12, 2015, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > I just thought I would share this with my friends on Exi: > > After 12 years of effort my company today signed our first large deal. We > have now a licensing agreement with a large pharma company to do a huge > amount of work that should result in a number of distinct drugs to be > brought to market in the next few years, all based on ideas that originated > in our company. Considering that we are still a tiny, 10-person biotech, > this is amazing and we are very excited to work on bringing our inventions > from the lab to the bedside! > > The drugs will target mitochondria in novel ways and should give us the > ability to very effectively target a range of diseases with substantially > fewer side effects compared to existing drugs. They will be awesome :) > > Rafal > Congratulations Rafal. -- Stathis Papaioannou -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From painlord2k at libero.it Wed Aug 12 21:23:17 2015 From: painlord2k at libero.it (Mirco Romanato) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2015 23:23:17 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Wow! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <55CBB945.3010109@libero.it> Il 12/08/2015 03:15, Rafal Smigrodzki ha scritto: > I just thought I would share this with my friends on Exi: > > After 12 years of effort my company today signed our first large deal. > We have now a licensing agreement with a large pharma company to do a > huge amount of work that should result in a number of distinct drugs to > be brought to market in the next few years, all based on ideas that > originated in our company. Considering that we are still a tiny, > 10-person biotech, this is amazing and we are very excited to work on > bringing our inventions from the lab to the bedside! > > The drugs will target mitochondria in novel ways and should give us the > ability to very effectively target a range of diseases with > substantially fewer side effects compared to existing drugs. They will > be awesome :) Awesome things come from awesome people like you. Mirco From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Thu Aug 13 00:03:09 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 12 Aug 2015 20:03:09 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Wow! In-Reply-To: <00b601d0d4a1$006f1f10$014d5d30$@att.net> References: <00b601d0d4a1$006f1f10$014d5d30$@att.net> Message-ID: Thank you all for your emails! The press release is already written but I do not know when our partners would release it. It will be rather circumspect, the competitors never sleep. My company is Gencia in Charlottesville, VA, the other is a large but not huge pharma company. What we have is a broadly applicable set of design principles and a number of specific ideas. We know we have compounds with very powerful anti-inflammatory properties, and the conditions where they are likely to be effective are legion - from COPD, to psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, radiation injury, inflammatory bowel disease. Basically, whatever has an inflammatory component is likely to at least partially respond to our compounds. And all our assays, in vivo and in vitro, point to a very favorable safety profile. I left some very vague hints about these compounds in my SENS6 presentation. Aging itself is not really a focus of the planned development efforts, although I would not be surprised if the compounds had an overall beneficial effect on some aspects of age-related dysfunction, based on the idea that mitochondrial suppression is an evolved, maladaptive response to the presence of biochemical stress signals (DAMPs). As they say, "More Research Is Needed (TM)". Of course, there is a lot more to aging than mitochondrial suppression, but this process clearly plays an important role. One thing that I am very excited about is that if everything goes well, my company will have the resources to participate in new ways of doing science. We see ourselves as an idea company - so far we do not have plans for a large buildup as a conventional pharma or biotech company. We would like to stay small and to generate new insights, rather than bring products to market on our own. I am sure that AI will have a transformative effect on bioscience. Soon it will be possible to use machine learning techniques to gain superior understanding of biochemistry and physiology. I want to make AI techniques an integral part of Gencia's approach to invention. The next 10 years will be very interesting. Rafa? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From nuala.t at gmail.com Thu Aug 13 04:53:27 2015 From: nuala.t at gmail.com (Nuala Thomson) Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2015 11:53:27 +0700 Subject: [ExI] Wow! In-Reply-To: References: <00b601d0d4a1$006f1f10$014d5d30$@att.net> Message-ID: Congrats! That's fantastic! I'd be happy to trial ;) Nuala > On 13 ???? 2015, at 07:03, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > Thank you all for your emails! > > The press release is already written but I do not know when our partners would release it. It will be rather circumspect, the competitors never sleep. My company is Gencia in Charlottesville, VA, the other is a large but not huge pharma company. > > What we have is a broadly applicable set of design principles and a number of specific ideas. We know we have compounds with very powerful anti-inflammatory properties, and the conditions where they are likely to be effective are legion - from COPD, to psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, radiation injury, inflammatory bowel disease. Basically, whatever has an inflammatory component is likely to at least partially respond to our compounds. And all our assays, in vivo and in vitro, point to a very favorable safety profile. I left some very vague hints about these compounds in my SENS6 presentation. > > Aging itself is not really a focus of the planned development efforts, although I would not be surprised if the compounds had an overall beneficial effect on some aspects of age-related dysfunction, based on the idea that mitochondrial suppression is an evolved, maladaptive response to the presence of biochemical stress signals (DAMPs). As they say, "More Research Is Needed (TM)". Of course, there is a lot more to aging than mitochondrial suppression, but this process clearly plays an important role. > > One thing that I am very excited about is that if everything goes well, my company will have the resources to participate in new ways of doing science. We see ourselves as an idea company - so far we do not have plans for a large buildup as a conventional pharma or biotech company. We would like to stay small and to generate new insights, rather than bring products to market on our own. I am sure that AI will have a transformative effect on bioscience. Soon it will be possible to use machine learning techniques to gain superior understanding of biochemistry and physiology. I want to make AI techniques an integral part of Gencia's approach to invention. > > The next 10 years will be very interesting. > > Rafa? > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From giulio at gmail.com Thu Aug 13 07:39:00 2015 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2015 09:39:00 +0200 Subject: [ExI] The Universe is disappearing In-Reply-To: <004101d0d504$decc97c0$9c65c740$@harveynewstrom.com> References: <004101d0d504$decc97c0$9c65c740$@harveynewstrom.com> Message-ID: Some related thoughts: http://turingchurch.com/2015/08/13/dont-worry-intelligent-life-will-reverse-the-slow-death-of-the-universe/ On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 3:43 PM, Harvey Newstrom wrote: > BillK wrote: >> (Although one galaxy should be enough for anyone!). > > Maybe we should start sequestration now, since we've already lost half our > property value. > > -- > Harvey Newstrom www.HarveyNewstrom.com > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From danust2012 at gmail.com Mon Aug 17 14:35:36 2015 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan) Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2015 07:35:36 -0700 Subject: [ExI] New pentagon tiling discovered Message-ID: <090F423B-8D28-4F5C-B9EE-A1D61BE3CB8B@gmail.com> http://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numberland/2015/aug/10/attack-on-the-pentagon-results-in-discovery-of-new-mathematical-tile No doubt, many here have already heard this. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books via: http://www.amazon.com/Dan-Ust/e/B00J6HPX8M/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Aug 17 15:22:03 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2015 08:22:03 -0700 Subject: [ExI] New pentagon tiling discovered In-Reply-To: <090F423B-8D28-4F5C-B9EE-A1D61BE3CB8B@gmail.com> References: <090F423B-8D28-4F5C-B9EE-A1D61BE3CB8B@gmail.com> Message-ID: <009101d0d900$7b340ae0$719c20a0$@att.net> >? On Behalf Of Dan Subject: [ExI] New pentagon tiling discovered http://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numberland/2015/aug/10/attack-on-the-pentagon-results-in-discovery-of-new-mathematical-tile No doubt, many here have already heard this. Regards, Dan Dan you can be sure this will result in a renewed attack on the pentagon. I might joint that myself. The math geek world is chattering about it. How must that have felt to these researchers when that solution dropped into their laps? Computers should have cameras set to record the human?s faces when they report results like this. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Aug 17 16:05:47 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2015 09:05:47 -0700 Subject: [ExI] New pentagon tiling discovered In-Reply-To: <009101d0d900$7b340ae0$719c20a0$@att.net> References: <090F423B-8D28-4F5C-B9EE-A1D61BE3CB8B@gmail.com> <009101d0d900$7b340ae0$719c20a0$@att.net> Message-ID: <00e101d0d906$97502eb0$c5f08c10$@att.net> From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of spike Sent: Monday, August 17, 2015 8:22 AM To: 'ExI chat list' Subject: Re: [ExI] New pentagon tiling discovered >? On Behalf Of Dan Subject: [ExI] New pentagon tiling discovered ? >?Dan you can be sure this will result in a renewed attack on the pentagon. I might joint that myself. spike Here?s the graphic the Guardian offered: Whooda thunk? That oddball expression for C turns out to be a fundamental expression of nature? Really? The five side lengths are 1, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5 and 0.965925826289068? Oh, this is a cool universe in which to have evolved, so cool. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 9629 bytes Desc: not available URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Aug 17 17:10:08 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2015 10:10:08 -0700 Subject: [ExI] New pentagon tiling discovered In-Reply-To: <00e101d0d906$97502eb0$c5f08c10$@att.net> References: <090F423B-8D28-4F5C-B9EE-A1D61BE3CB8B@gmail.com> <009101d0d900$7b340ae0$719c20a0$@att.net> <00e101d0d906$97502eb0$c5f08c10$@att.net> Message-ID: <017401d0d90f$96dc4820$c494d860$@att.net> From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of spike ? Here?s the graphic the Guardian offered: >?Whooda thunk? spike If you form the triangle CEB, all three sides are irrational but the angles come out to integer ratio multiples of pi: ?, 1/3, 5/12, or for the degree fans among us: 45, 60, 75. I see this as a proof there is no designer of the universe. Reasoning: had there been a Grand Designer, when she was setting up something like this (perhaps as a little joke for math geeks to discover way down the road) she would have thought about their faces when they discovered it and ended up laughing so hard the whole thing would have been wrecked. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 9629 bytes Desc: not available URL: From spike66 at att.net Mon Aug 17 16:33:53 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2015 09:33:53 -0700 Subject: [ExI] New pentagon tiling discovered In-Reply-To: <009101d0d900$7b340ae0$719c20a0$@att.net> References: <090F423B-8D28-4F5C-B9EE-A1D61BE3CB8B@gmail.com> <009101d0d900$7b340ae0$719c20a0$@att.net> Message-ID: <013e01d0d90a$8325d760$89718620$@att.net> From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of spike Sent: Monday, August 17, 2015 8:22 AM To: 'ExI chat list' Subject: Re: [ExI] New pentagon tiling discovered >? On Behalf Of Dan Subject: [ExI] New pentagon tiling discovered http://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numberland/2015/aug/10/attack-on-the-pentagon-results-in-discovery-of-new-mathematical-tile >? Computers should have cameras set to record the human faces when they report results like this?spike Dan this was me when I saw it: https://jtriley2013.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/tongue-out.png?w=300 Consider the triangle CEB in this graphic: cid:image002.jpg at 01D0D8CB.E7B4A240 Side length CE is sqrt(2)/2. EB comes out to sqrt(3)/4. (Not kidding, see for yourself.) The third side is 1/((sqrt(2)((sqrt(3)-1))). So now, which is it please: is this the ugliest bathroom tile ever discovered, or the most beautiful? Now is such a fun time to be a math geek. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image004.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 9629 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image002.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 9389 bytes Desc: not available URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Aug 17 21:33:31 2015 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2015 14:33:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Slashdot Message-ID: http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/15/08/17/1414211/interviews-ask-engineer-and-l5-society-cofounder-keith-henson-a-question Come by and join the fun. Also, if you are interested in the topic of space based solar power, this group is starting to pick up a little action. https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!forum/power-satellite-economics Keith From danust2012 at gmail.com Mon Aug 17 23:08:45 2015 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan) Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2015 16:08:45 -0700 Subject: [ExI] New pentagon tiling discovered In-Reply-To: <013e01d0d90a$8325d760$89718620$@att.net> References: <090F423B-8D28-4F5C-B9EE-A1D61BE3CB8B@gmail.com> <009101d0d900$7b340ae0$719c20a0$@att.net> <013e01d0d90a$8325d760$89718620$@att.net> Message-ID: > On Aug 17, 2015, at 9:33 AM, "spike" wrote: > > Consider the triangle CEB in this graphic: > > > > > Side length CE is sqrt(2)/2. EB comes out to sqrt(3)/4. (Not kidding, see for yourself.) The third side is 1/((sqrt(2)((sqrt(3)-1))). > > So now, which is it please: is this the ugliest bathroom tile ever discovered, or the most beautiful? > > Now is such a fun time to be a math geek. > > spike Spike: thanks for sharing your enthusiasm and more details about this finding. ;) Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books via: http://www.amazon.com/Dan-Ust/e/B00J6HPX8M/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Tue Aug 18 15:57:46 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2015 17:57:46 +0200 Subject: [ExI] New pentagon tiling discovered In-Reply-To: <017401d0d90f$96dc4820$c494d860$@att.net> Message-ID: <1099368353-13150@secure.ericade.net> From: spike ?I see this as a proof there is no designer of the universe.? Reasoning: had there been a Grand Designer, when she was setting up something like this (perhaps as a little joke for math geeks to discover way down the road) she would have thought about their faces when they discovered it and ended up laughing so hard the whole thing would have been wrecked. It reminds me of the Borwein integrals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borwein_integral Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Tue Aug 18 16:33:28 2015 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan) Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2015 09:33:28 -0700 Subject: [ExI] New pentagon tiling discovered In-Reply-To: <1099368353-13150@secure.ericade.net> References: <1099368353-13150@secure.ericade.net> Message-ID: On Aug 18, 2015, at 8:57 AM, Anders Sandberg wrote: > > From: spike > > I see this as a proof there is no designer of the universe. Reasoning: had there been a Grand Designer, when she was setting up something like this (perhaps as a little joke for math geeks to discover way down the road) she would have thought about their faces when they discovered it and ended up laughing so hard the whole thing would have been wrecked. > > > > It reminds me of the Borwein integrals: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borwein_integral The sinc functions rears its head again. Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books via: http://www.amazon.com/Dan-Ust/e/B00J6HPX8M/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Aug 18 17:04:17 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2015 10:04:17 -0700 Subject: [ExI] hal finney and gimps, was: RE: New pentagon tiling discovered Message-ID: <00ad01d0d9d7$ed7cf5d0$c876e170$@att.net> >? On Behalf Of Anders Sandberg Subject: Re: [ExI] New pentagon tiling discovered From: spike >>? I see this as a proof there is no designer of the universe. Reasoning: had there been a Grand Designer, when she was setting up something like this (perhaps as a little joke for math geeks to discover way down the road) she would have thought about their faces when they discovered it and ended up laughing so hard the whole thing would have been wrecked. >?It reminds me of the Borwein integrals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borwein_integral >Anders Sandberg,? Ja, excellent, thanks Anders. I had never heard of Borwein integrals. It feels like something set up specifically to screw with our minds. It is working on me. This whole attack on the pentagon thing really has me thinking back on an incident which happened here over 17 yrs ago. Anders you have been here the whole time, some of you others do help me remember please as many of the details as we can. Somewhere around I think about early 1998 or so, we were discussing a recently-discovered new Mersenne Prime and how I got that look on my face, posted earlier, whenever a new one was discovered. The GIMPS group had its own online chat. In that group, someone posted to the discoverer of M(3021377) with the offer ?I?ll give you 10 thousand bucks for that computer? The owner posted back with the ambiguous ?Ha ha. Serious offers only please.? OK now. That got me to wondering, and I posted to ExI about the exchange. The computer in question was an already-outdated Intel 486 box, which the user could put aside and assign to GIMPS, since he already owned a Pentium machine. The market value of an Intel 486 box at the time would be about 100 bucks tops. So was the owner not aware that the computer on which the prime was discovered is now a valuable museum piece and would have gladly turned over the machine for 500, assuming the 10k bid was a joke? Or was the owner assuming the machine was far more valuable than 10k? We still don?t know. For all we know, that valuable relic computer could have ended up in the trash. That led to our discussing the fact that being a Mersenne discoverer means nothing to normal people. To math geeks, it is a lifetime achievement, it means being able to sell your bath water at the geek gatherings. Everywhere you went, geeks would remove pebbles from the pathway upon which you tread, so that you might not injure your delicate feet, all while assuring you they are unworthy, they suck, etc. So a normal person who discovered a Mersenne Prime could offer it up for sale. A number becomes a thing of great value. A geek could buy the number, register it, run a check, submit to GIMPS, get in the history books on a short list with Euler and God, start bottling bath water. One of our Extropian RSPs Hal Finney was reading all this and (being Hal) went off and co-developed or invented a system which does something like that, performs some kind of special calculation and creates numbers which can be traded as currency. Hal Finney read our Mersenne Prime as currency discussion, then went off and invented BitCoin. Hal is no longer with us, and didn?t answer email in the last couple years of his life. Can anyone here offer any details? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From anders at aleph.se Tue Aug 18 20:19:15 2015 From: anders at aleph.se (Anders Sandberg) Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2015 22:19:15 +0200 Subject: [ExI] hal finney and gimps, was: RE: New pentagon tiling discovered In-Reply-To: <00ad01d0d9d7$ed7cf5d0$c876e170$@att.net> Message-ID: <1114380348-3132@secure.ericade.net> From:?spike ? ?One of our Extropian RSPs Hal Finney was reading all this and (being Hal) went off and co-developed or invented a system which does something like that, performs some kind of special calculation and creates numbers which can be traded as currency.? Hal Finney read our Mersenne Prime as currency discussion, then went off and invented BitCoin. I am reminded of John Baez post https://plus.google.com/117663015413546257905/posts/bPCvcDTDysi He starts out with a great quote ("What's the saddest thing about being a mathematician?? Seeing worlds of soul-shattering beauty - but being unable to share this beauty with most people.") but it is the ending that really links it to Hal's story: "You may be wondering:?So, what's this all good for? And the answer is: nobody knows yet.? But this amazing fact about the number 6 is connected to many other amazing things in mathematics, like the group E8 and the Leech lattice, both of which show up in string theory.? I don't know if string theory is on the right track.? But I hope that someday, when we understand the universe better than we do now, these mysterious and beautiful mathematical structures will turn out to be important - not just curiosities, but?part of why things are the way they are." Many of these things turn out to be important, yet in ways we cannot fathom when we discover or learn about them. Today I made use of a piece of math I learned back at the start of the 90s to say something relevant about the brain. Google's pagerank algorithm is based on the link between eigenvalues and graph theory - and the reason it runs so well is pretty deep. Whatever beats Google from being the biggest, coolest company around is IMHO likely to be based on a small piece of math or other understanding that come from a completely different area from its applications. Maybe the secret of AI is hidden in intersection theory or tropical geometry.? Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Wed Aug 19 05:56:05 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2015 22:56:05 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Slashdot In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 2:33 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > > http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/15/08/17/1414211/interviews-ask-engineer-and-l5-society-cofounder-keith-henson-a-question > > Come by and join the fun. > I've tossed you a question, though I'll admit it's a rehash of what I keep asking when the topic comes up here. (But then, you've never really answered it here.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From brindleswan at tutanota.de Wed Aug 19 22:59:53 2015 From: brindleswan at tutanota.de (Brindle Swan) Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2015 22:59:53 +0000 (UTC) Subject: [ExI] Mathematics by Van der Graaf Generator Message-ID: https://youtu.be/EbIpscF1Vrk "Mathematics" by Peter Hammill Here be numbers transcendental, On an imaginary axis spun, Decimal places without limit And zero and one. Mathematics, Simply pure beyond belief. E to the power of i times pi plus one is zero E to the power of i times pi plus one is zero E to the power of i times pi is minus one E to the power of i times pi is minus one A single function, exponential, Just one addition must be done... Multiplication in completion Of zero, of one. Mathematics, Just so "wow" it brooks belief. (You'd better believe, you'd better believe it.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Thu Aug 20 16:19:33 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2015 17:19:33 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are Message-ID: We Can?t Find Any Alien Neighbors and Virtual Reality Might Be to Blame By Aaron Frank Aug 20, 2015 Quotes: To address the Fermi Paradox, futurist John Smart proposes the fascinating ?transcension hypothesis? theorizing that evolutionary processes in our universe might lead all advanced civilizations towards the same ultimate destination; one in which we transcend out of our current space-time dimension into virtual worlds of our own design. Soon, we won?t visit the Internet from the glass window of our computer screens, but rather walk around inside it as a physical place. Philip Rosedale, the creator of Second Life, recently announced plans for a bold new virtual universe with a potential physical game map as large as the landmass of Earth. Essentially, he?ll create a virtual world with its own laws of physics, and once he?s pressed play, a newly formed universe will have its own ?let there be light? creation moment. As we continue our plunge into virtual spaces, the validity of the transcension hypothesis will come into sharper focus. If technology trends toward a world of microscopic computers with infinitely complex realities inside, this might explain why we can?t see any alien neighbors. They?ve left us behind for the digital wormholes of their own design. --------------- Sounds plausible to me. BillK From foozler83 at gmail.com Fri Aug 21 00:21:35 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Thu, 20 Aug 2015 19:21:35 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: What will happen when the technology has evolved to the point that people actually prefer virtual experiences to real ones? (from singularity hub) I argue that it's already so, in a way. Substitute 'fantasy' for 'virtual reality'. Just think of the news: political - probably won't affect us except for small changes in taxes, yet people devote hours a days to reading about Trump etc.; sports - ditto (including the taxes, for those whose cities build stadia for teams for bragging purposes); entertainment - celebrities, movies, books, porn and other internet, surfing and so on. I am currently spending my time with my nose in books (scifi, The China Study), which is mostly fiction, except for The China Study, which is changing my diet. People already prefer TV, movies, internet, People magazine, to reality, however defined. Oh, I look at my 80 rose bushes often and harvest my tomatoes, etc. but most of my time is spent in books. Predictable since I am an extreme introvert. My nonfiction reading probably has little effect on my daily life. But even the extroverts prefer to talk with each other about gossip and movies and so on, and the fiction they make up about their lives. Reality? Boring - same old same old - when it isn't truly frightening and gruesome. Give me a good scifi book and let me go to alternate universes. Bill W On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 11:19 AM, BillK wrote: > We Can?t Find Any Alien Neighbors and Virtual Reality Might Be to Blame > By Aaron Frank Aug 20, 2015 > > < > http://singularityhub.com/2015/08/20/we-cant-find-any-alien-neighbors-and-virtual-reality-might-be-to-blame/ > > > > Quotes: > To address the Fermi Paradox, futurist John Smart proposes the > fascinating ?transcension hypothesis? theorizing that evolutionary > processes in our universe might lead all advanced civilizations > towards the same ultimate destination; one in which we transcend out > of our current space-time dimension into virtual worlds of our own > design. > > Soon, we won?t visit the Internet from the glass window of our > computer screens, but rather walk around inside it as a physical > place. Philip Rosedale, the creator of Second Life, recently announced > plans for a bold new virtual universe with a potential physical game > map as large as the landmass of Earth. Essentially, he?ll create a > virtual world with its own laws of physics, and once he?s pressed > play, a newly formed universe will have its own ?let there be light? > creation moment. > > As we continue our plunge into virtual spaces, the validity of the > transcension hypothesis will come into sharper focus. If technology > trends toward a world of microscopic computers with infinitely complex > realities inside, this might explain why we can?t see any alien > neighbors. They?ve left us behind for the digital wormholes of their > own design. > --------------- > > > Sounds plausible to me. > > BillK > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From giulio at gmail.com Fri Aug 21 07:10:18 2015 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2015 09:10:18 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I think it's very plausible that people in advanced alien civilizations live as disembodied software and interact in VR scapes, like in Greg Egan's Diaspora. But that doesn't mean that they lose interest in the physical universe and space exploration. It just means that their footprint on the universe is usually small and therefore they are more difficult to detect. Their long-range communications might be based on physics that we don't understand yet. An alien nanoprobe crewed by thousands of upload just landed on the tip of my nose, too bad I didn't see it. On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 6:19 PM, BillK wrote: > We Can?t Find Any Alien Neighbors and Virtual Reality Might Be to Blame > By Aaron Frank Aug 20, 2015 > > > > Quotes: > To address the Fermi Paradox, futurist John Smart proposes the > fascinating ?transcension hypothesis? theorizing that evolutionary > processes in our universe might lead all advanced civilizations > towards the same ultimate destination; one in which we transcend out > of our current space-time dimension into virtual worlds of our own > design. > > Soon, we won?t visit the Internet from the glass window of our > computer screens, but rather walk around inside it as a physical > place. Philip Rosedale, the creator of Second Life, recently announced > plans for a bold new virtual universe with a potential physical game > map as large as the landmass of Earth. Essentially, he?ll create a > virtual world with its own laws of physics, and once he?s pressed > play, a newly formed universe will have its own ?let there be light? > creation moment. > > As we continue our plunge into virtual spaces, the validity of the > transcension hypothesis will come into sharper focus. If technology > trends toward a world of microscopic computers with infinitely complex > realities inside, this might explain why we can?t see any alien > neighbors. They?ve left us behind for the digital wormholes of their > own design. > --------------- > > > Sounds plausible to me. > > BillK > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From steinberg.will at gmail.com Fri Aug 21 17:02:59 2015 From: steinberg.will at gmail.com (Will Steinberg) Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2015 13:02:59 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: If you were an alien civilization who had mastered at least interstellar if not intergalactic travel, WHY would you stop on a shitty little planet broadcasting radio transmissions like probably a bunch of other shitty little planets you've flown by the past parsec. Maybe at the most put a little note on your map saying "come back here in a few millennia." It's like asking why we don't try and contact deer civilizations. If you're speeding through the galaxy, you better have a Dyson sphere if you want me to even slow down. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Fri Aug 21 17:28:52 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2015 18:28:52 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 21 August 2015 at 08:10, Giulio Prisco wrote: > I think it's very plausible that people in advanced alien > civilizations live as disembodied software and interact in VR scapes, > like in Greg Egan's Diaspora. But that doesn't mean that they lose > interest in the physical universe and space exploration. It just means > that their footprint on the universe is usually small and therefore > they are more difficult to detect. Their long-range communications > might be based on physics that we don't understand yet. > > An alien nanoprobe crewed by thousands of upload just landed on the > tip of my nose, too bad I didn't see it. > Once a civ moves to nanoscale VR then they have a scaling problem when relating to the outside universe. If they are really tiny, then moving at high speed becomes difficult. Every physical force is magnified. Grains of interstellar dust appear huge. Distances are magnified. If they have much faster processing, then time itself is magnified. If they want to visit strange worlds and meet aliens, then they can create them in their own VR universe. BillK From johnkclark at gmail.com Fri Aug 21 19:51:20 2015 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2015 15:51:20 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 12:19 PM, BillK wrote: ?> ? > John Smart proposes the > ? ? > fascinating ?transcension hypothesis? theorizing that evolutionary > ? ? > processes in our universe might lead all advanced civilizations > ? ? > towards the same ultimate destination; one in which we transcend out > ? ? > of our current space-time dimension into virtual worlds of our own > ? ? > design. ?But it takes calculations to produce virtual reality ?and it takes energy to perform calculations, the faster the calculation the more energy needed; and yet we observe astronomical amounts of energy radiating uselessly into infinite space not just from our galaxy but from every one of the billions of galaxies ever observed. Of course there are trillions of galaxies more distant than 13.8 billion light years that we have never observed and will never observe so maybe ET is in one of them, or maybe not. I'd bet 2 to 1 that we're alone. John K Clark > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Sat Aug 22 02:11:34 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2015 19:11:34 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Slashdot In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 10:56 PM, Adrian Tymes wrote: > On Mon, Aug 17, 2015 at 2:33 PM, Keith Henson > wrote: > >> >> http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/15/08/17/1414211/interviews-ask-engineer-and-l5-society-cofounder-keith-henson-a-question >> >> Come by and join the fun. >> > > I've tossed you a question, though I'll admit it's a rehash of what I keep > asking when the topic comes up here. (But then, you've never really > answered it here.) > So...when are you going to answer the questions the posters have posted? I'm not seeing any further activity in that forum thread. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bbenzai at yahoo.com Sat Aug 22 08:03:41 2015 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben) Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2015 09:03:41 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Diet In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <55D82CDD.5060402@yahoo.com> William Flynn Wallace wrote: > I am currently spending my time with my nose in books (scifi, The China > Study), which is mostly fiction, except for The China Study, which is > changing my diet. > > Bill W Hi, Bill. If you're reading the China Study, you might also want to consider reading what Denise Minger has to say. It's always good to get more than one view on something as important as diet: http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fallac/ I find her to be very fair-handed, and interesting to read. She also has a book you may be interested in, 'Death by Food Pyramid', available on Amazon. Ben Zaiboc From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Aug 22 14:49:39 2015 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2015 07:49:39 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are (BillK) Message-ID: On Sat, Aug 22, 2015 at 5:00 AM, BillK wrote: > Once a civ moves to nanoscale VR then they have a scaling problem when > relating to the outside universe. If they are really tiny, then moving > at high speed becomes difficult. Every physical force is magnified. > Grains of interstellar dust appear huge. Distances are magnified. If > they have much faster processing, then time itself is magnified. Indeed. If they are a social species, then the range in which they can interact with others of the civilization shrinks dramatically. I made a case in an article you have seen that a civ will have to shrink to 300 meters or less depending on how much the culture speeds up. Fast processing generates a lot of waste heat, so it makes sense to sink the "civilization" in the deep cold ocean. > If they want to visit strange worlds and meet aliens, then they can > create them in their own VR universe. I would probably find this unsatisfying. But I know how far out I am from the norm. John Clark wrote: > ?But it takes calculations to produce virtual reality ?and it takes energy > to perform calculations, the faster the calculation the more energy needed; > and yet we observe astronomical amounts of energy radiating uselessly into > infinite space not just from our galaxy but from every one of the billions > of galaxies ever observed. That's true. > Of course there are trillions of galaxies more > distant than 13.8 billion light years that we have never observed and will > never observe so maybe ET is in one of them, or maybe not. I'd bet 2 to 1 > that we're alone. If they were sunk in the deep oceans of Earth like planets, we would never see them. I think we understand the physics of computation much better than the sociology of arbitrary evolved aliens. Moving into virtual reality and speeding up by a million times is like the universe suddenly moved away from you. The already ridiculous distance to other stars becomes insanely large. Adrian Tymes wrote: >> I've tossed you a question, though I'll admit it's a rehash of what I keep >> asking when the topic comes up here. (But then, you've never really >> answered it here.) > > So...when are you going to answer the questions the posters have posted? > I'm not seeing any further activity in that forum thread. I got the scaled down list questions from the organizer yesterday and intend to send the responses back today. But I didn't see one from you. Please point me to the right place or send it directly. Keith From atymes at gmail.com Sat Aug 22 16:13:17 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2015 09:13:17 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are (BillK) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Aug 22, 2015 at 7:49 AM, Keith Henson wrote: > I got the scaled down list questions from the organizer yesterday and > intend to send the responses back today. But I didn't see one from > you. Please point me to the right place or send it directly. > I posted it on the thread, but perhaps the organizer left it off because it was posted late so no one voted on it. (It's only got score 2 instead of 1 because I have an account that's racked up a bit of karma.) http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/15/08/17/1414211/interviews-ask-engineer-and-l5-society-cofounder-keith-henson-a-question - "Minimum cost"; you'll probably have to scroll to the bottom to see it. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sat Aug 22 16:13:15 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2015 17:13:15 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 22 August 2015 at 15:49, Keith Henson wrote: > Indeed. If they are a social species, then the range in which they > can interact with others of the civilization shrinks dramatically. I > made a case in an article you have seen that a civ will have to shrink > to 300 meters or less depending on how much the culture speeds up. > Fast processing generates a lot of waste heat, so it makes sense to > sink the "civilization" in the deep cold ocean. > > If they were sunk in the deep oceans of Earth like planets, we would > never see them. I think we understand the physics of computation much > better than the sociology of arbitrary evolved aliens. Moving into > virtual reality and speeding up by a million times is like the > universe suddenly moved away from you. The already ridiculous > distance to other stars becomes insanely large. > Is it safe to assume that advanced future computing will generate a lot of waste heat? They almost certainly won't be pushing electrons through copper wiring. We are just on the edge of optical computing and photons don't create waste heat. Spintronics is also a new field that creates little heat. Some spintronic devices actually *use* waste heat from elsewhere. Who knows what nanotech will bring us? 'Waste' heat probably has uses. What will be the end state of an advanced civ? Surely not just an inert sphere glowing white-hot? That may be in the centre, but maintenance, communication and protection systems should also be required and they need energy. If the civ is thinking long-term then being stuck in an ocean is probably not a good idea. Drifting in deep space sounds better and more eternal. BillK From spike66 at att.net Sat Aug 22 17:03:49 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2015 10:03:49 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of BillK Subject: [Bulk] Re: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are >...Is it safe to assume that advanced future computing will generate a lot of waste heat?... BillK _______________________________________________ If they actually do anything, photons do create waste heat. The third law applies to them as well. But we know what you meant: photons are a way more efficient way to transfer signals than pushing electrons down a wire: entropy production is way lower. The reason I focus on your comment is not to strain at gnats BillK, but rather because I have really been pondering how to calculate temperature gradients in an MBrain using entropy. If I can bound the problem using the third law, we might at least get a best-case scenario. This technique is what led me to the insight that MBrains would overheat unless you reflect most of the energy out of the system. By my understanding of entropy and the third law of thermodynamics, an MBrain not only has the option of turning its star into a photon rocket, it is required to do so. If that notion is correct, then an MBrain would be detectable. That we don't see one is evidence that MBrains do not currently exist, or if so, there aren't many of them. That is an insight I regret Robert Bradbury did not live long enough for me to share with him, for I didn't discover it until a few months after his untimely passing. spike From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Aug 22 17:38:14 2015 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2015 13:38:14 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are (BillK) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Aug 22, 2015 Keith Henson wrote: > ?> ? > If they are a social species, then the range in which they > ? ? > can interact with others of the civilization shrinks dramatically. > made a case in an article you have seen that a civ will have to shrink > ? ? > to 300 meters or less depending on how much the culture speeds up. > ?All true, b ut even in a social species some individuals are going to be more social than others, it seems likely that some ET Daniel Boone ? would set off into the wilderness a mile or two away and start his own civilization. ? > > ?> i > f they were sunk in the deep oceans of Earth like planets, we would > ? ? > never see them. ?ET might decide to move to the sea after technology was developed, but ? I think it would be almost impossible for sea creatures, however smart, to develop technology. The laws of Newtonian Physics were hard enough to discover for humans who lived in ?an? ? ? atmosphere not a vacuum, but it would be astronomically harder under water; there ?it would look like ? things NEVER move at the same speed unless a force is constantly applied, and intelligent fish wouldn't have the motions of the stars and planets to help them figure out basic physics. Even humans would never have discovered Quantum Mechanics if they hadn't figured out a way to make a vacuum first. And intelligent fish would lack one of the first and most important inventions, fire ?. And without fire you couldn't make iron tools, or even bronze, or even copper. ? John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sat Aug 22 19:10:40 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2015 14:10:40 -0500 Subject: [ExI] book Message-ID: Have any of you read The China Study? It has just amazing findings in it. A nutrition book not a diet book though he does recommend a whole plant diet. I am mostly attracted to the paleo diet, but this book really has made me think, esp. the low protein diet that stopped cancers in lab rats. Opinions? Bill W -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Sat Aug 22 19:28:14 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2015 20:28:14 +0100 Subject: [ExI] book Message-ID: Reposted from my gmail Spam folder (gmail doesn't like Exi posts from yahoo) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Ben Date: 22 August 2015 at 09:03 Subject: [ExI] Diet To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org William Flynn Wallace wrote: > I am currently spending my time with my nose in books (scifi, The China > Study), which is mostly fiction, except for The China Study, which is > changing my diet. > > Bill W Hi, Bill. If you're reading the China Study, you might also want to consider reading what Denise Minger has to say. It's always good to get more than one view on something as important as diet: http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fallac/ I find her to be very fair-handed, and interesting to read. She also has a book you may be interested in, 'Death by Food Pyramid', available on Amazon. Ben Zaiboc _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From foozler83 at gmail.com Sun Aug 23 00:48:55 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2015 19:48:55 -0500 Subject: [ExI] book In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I find her to be very fair-handed, and interesting to read. She also has a book you may be interested in, 'Death by Food Pyramid', available on Amazon. Ben Zaiboc Thanks Ben - I just bought the book, based on your recommendation and a perusal of her website. We'll see. At least both authors agree that the government and industry have really screwed up big time by focusing simply on money - at our expense. I simply cannot believe that all of this obesity is caused solely by overeating (I think we'll find that the gut bacteria play a big role). bill w On Sat, Aug 22, 2015 at 2:28 PM, BillK wrote: > Reposted from my gmail Spam folder > (gmail doesn't like Exi posts from yahoo) > > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: Ben > Date: 22 August 2015 at 09:03 > Subject: [ExI] Diet > To: extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > > > William Flynn Wallace wrote: > > > I am currently spending my time with my nose in books (scifi, The China > > Study), which is mostly fiction, except for The China Study, which is > > changing my diet. > > > > Bill W > > > Hi, Bill. > > If you're reading the China Study, you might also want to consider > reading what Denise Minger has to say. It's always good to get more > than one view on something as important as diet: > > http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fallac/ > > I find her to be very fair-handed, and interesting to read. She also > has a book you may be interested in, 'Death by Food Pyramid', > available on Amazon. > > Ben Zaiboc > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Sun Aug 23 02:09:13 2015 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Sat, 22 Aug 2015 22:09:13 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Aug 22, 2015 1:18 PM, "spike" wrote: > MBrain not only has the option of turning its star into a photon rocket, it > is required to do so. If that notion is correct, then an MBrain would be > detectable. That we don't see one is evidence that MBrains do not currently > exist, or if so, there aren't many of them. If a beam of photons isn't headed straight at us (mbrain is leaving) then how would we detect it? If there was a black hole where the home system used to be, that beam would be swallowed? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From scerir at alice.it Sun Aug 23 15:29:37 2015 From: scerir at alice.it (scerir at alice.it) Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2015 17:29:37 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] R: hal finney and gimps, was: RE: New pentagon tiling discovered Message-ID: <14f5b2ddf38.scerir@alice.it> Hal is no longer with us, and didn?t answer email in the last couple years of his life. Can anyone here offer any details? spike No details. But links. http://tinyurl.com/qgwwbgc http://www.coindesk.com/hal-finney-bitcoin-words/ http://tinyurl.com/kmcrvok http://tinyurl.com/mplodgh https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.0 http://www.wired.com/2014/08/hal-finney/ From mail at harveynewstrom.com Sun Aug 23 15:44:13 2015 From: mail at harveynewstrom.com (Harvey Newstrom) Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2015 11:44:13 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Old Nutrition Studies Message-ID: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> The China study is old. It started in 1983 and measured variables of diet known at the time. We know a lot more now. Nobody should be taking their advice from such an old study. The question of whether this study was "right" or "wrong" is irrelevant. We know a lot more nuance about nutrition now than we did then. So arguing whether this study was right or wrong misses the point about whether we should eat meat, fat, cholesterol, or turn vegetarian. Here are some examples of what has changed since the China study and other similar older studies. 1. Early statistics seemed to show that meat causes cancer. People who ate meat get cancer at statistically higher rates than people who didn't eat meat. So it made sense to avoid meat. However, correlation does not mean causation. Later studies subdivided variables to try to isolate how and why meat causes cancer. It turns out that cooking method was one of the big factors in this. Charring meat with heat creates carcinogens. If we cook meat without charring it, we avoid the creation of most of these carcinogens. Does that mean the original studies were wrong and meat did not cause cancer? I say no. As a whole, most meat really was causing cancer. But does this mean that the study was right and should we stop eating meat to avoid cancer? Again, no. We now know how to cook meat to avoid these charring induced carcinogens. Does that mean reality changed or the studies keep flip-flopping? No, we learn more and more and keep further refining our nutritional understanding. This is not the same as being wrong or changing our theories all the time. We are actually continually improving our theories so that they get better and better over time. 2. Early statistics seemed to show that cholesterol clogs arteries leading to heart attacks. People who had higher blood cholesterol levels get clogged arteries and have heart attacks at statistically higher rates than people who don't. So it made sense to avoid dietary cholesterol. However, correlation does not mean causation. Later studies subdivided variables even further. It turns out that dietary cholesterol is very small and does not raise blood cholesterol as much as other dietary factors that raise cholesterol. Eating cholesterol containing foods such as eggs and shellfish turns out to not raise blood cholesterol very much. However, eating lots of saturated fats and refined carbohydrates turns out to skyrocket cholesterol and related compounds like triglycerides. We also know that there are different kinds of cholesterol, HDL (good) cholesterol and LDL (bad) cholesterol and other kinds of cholesterol. Most people have the bad kind, so most early studies found the bad results. But some people who measured "high cholesterol" actually had low bad cholesterol and high good cholesterol. Such people actually had better results they higher their good cholesterol got. So any old study (such as the China study) that simply measures "cholesterol" without distinguishing the good from the bad is practically useless. We don't know what they were measuring. We don't know if differences were in the good or bad kind. We don't correlate which changes caused which results. Does that mean the original studies were wrong and cholesterol did not cause heart attacks? I say no. As a whole, most high cholesterol readings were the bad cholesterol which really was causing heart attacks. But does this mean that the study was right and should we stop eating cholesterol or use blood cholesterol levels to predict heart attacks? Again, no. We now know that total cholesterol does not indicate good or bad predictions. We now look at different cholesterol levels and the ratios between them for better measures. Again, we are not changing the theories about cholesterol. We are further refining our nutritional understanding of how different cholesterols effect the cardiovascular system. 3. There are similar examples with eating a high fat diet. We now know that there are good fats and bad fats. Early studies did not distinguish between good fats and bad fats. We now know that some fats should be decreased in the diet while others should be increased. It is too simplistic to argue whether "fat" is good or bad. 4. A related example of refining our knowledge occurred with butter vs. margarine. Scientists were correct when they statistically correlated saturated fat with heart attacks. They suggested that people switch from butter to vegetable oils. So many people did. And many people started having more problems than before. Were the scientists wrong? Not really. We now know that most vegetable oil margarines are hydrogenated, making them even more super-saturated than the saturated fats. They also induced more trans fats, which is also a very bad dietary fat. So while scientists recommended that people switch to vegetable oils to eat less saturated far, people actually switched to hydrogenated vegetable oils which were even more saturated fat than before. While it was mistakenly believed that people were eating less saturated fat, they were actually eating much more saturated fat. We now know a lot more about the whole spectrum of fats. And we know that hydrogenated oils in margarines are worse than saturated fats in the same way that saturated fats are worse than natural vegetable oils. 5. There are older studies that found that the autopsied brains of people who ate soy had more dementia indications than people who did not eat soy. However it was later found that the people who ate soy were living longer. So what they really found was that older people have more dementia indications than younger people. When correlated for age, people who eat soy do not have more dementia indications than people who do not eat soy. 6. There was a recent theory that too much estrogen might cause hormone problems for males and that soy contains a pseudo-estrogen. So people stopped drinking soy milk and switched back to cow's milk. Then it was realized that cow's milk has a magnitude more times real estrogen than soy has pseudo estrogens. If people really wanted to avoid estrogen, they should stop drinking cow's milk and switch to soy milk. My point with these various examples is that science works over time and keeps getting better and better. But it's not perfect. We cannot argue whether an older study is right or wrong. The answer is almost always more nuanced and has to be subdivided into other better questions about what was right and what was wrong. Ideas about increasing or decreasing a single food group (meat, grains, dairy) or a single macronutrient (fat, protein, carbs) are usually too simplistic. The more we study these questions, the more they fragment into many more precise questions until the original question becomes meaningless. Are carbs good or bad? Is fat good or bad? Is meat good or bad? Is vegetarianism better or worse? Is veganism better or worse? All of these are invalid questions. Depending what kinds of carbs, fats, meats, vegetarian diet or vegan diet you choose, you can answer these questions either way. And the answer to the question about whether any particular study is good or bad should be approach by looking at further refined studies. It almost never can be answered by deciding if the study is good (and accepting all of its conclusions) or deciding that a study is bad (and rejecting all of its conclusions). Both of these extreme edge-case positions is almost always wrong. -- Harvey Newstrom www.HarveyNewstrom.com From atymes at gmail.com Sun Aug 23 20:35:07 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2015 13:35:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Engineering-to-financial leap Message-ID: Thinking about the question I poised to Keith, I realized I'd made a bit of a leap that certain others on this list might benefit from copying. I apologize in advance that this is a chain of thought ramble. I know there are others here, like Keith and myself, with engineering backgrounds and good plans to produce technology that, frankly, the world would consider wondrous...if only we could get financing to build it. For most of us, that's where it ends: we retreat back to whatever we are doing because finance appears to be an unassailable problem short of some large grant or stroke of luck. But it's not. Finding out how to turn such plans into reality, using only those financial sources that are readily available, turns out to be amenable to the same sorts of analysis by which we developed the technology. Finance can be engineered, in the same sense of the word that we are used to. And we can do engineering. Now, you'll have to study up on business. Financial engineering is as different from other engineering as, say, mechanical engineering is different from software engineering. There are a number of good quality, free online courses out there, such as https://www.coursera.org/course/innovativeideas - most of us can watch the lectures and do the coursework in our spare time, so long as we make sure to do it each week. (You're the type who, when you got a 4-answer multiple-choice quiz, could usually see which two answers were blatantly false then spend a minute or two finding which of the remaining answers was wrong, then guess the remaining answer and usually guess correctly, right? That's about how hard this stuff is.) You'll also need to focus on showing the benefits of your technology. This should not be hard: if you weren't convinced it was better, you wouldn't be dreaming of it, but now you need to learn how to share your dream. Start with why the technology matters - what good does it do - who benefits and how - what value is delivered to those who benefit - and how might a portion of that value be delivered back to the provider? Focus especially on those likely to benefit early and strong. This will often be those with more resources. (If you have a moral need for your tech to help everyone, remember that this is merely a stage of development - someone has to be the first customer - and you have to pass through it just like you have to pass through theory and testing, before you finally get to where it's benefiting everyone.) Many funding sources only become available after you have a solid plan for how you will use their funds. This is just like any major project: you need to articulate a coherent plan of development before you can get stakeholder approval, and those that write the checks are almost always among the stakeholders. In this case, you often have to show how they will get their money back with some interest ("return on investment"/"ROI"), but this can be seen as proof that you are delivering value: if your technology is not one that anyone would pay for, does it actually benefit anyone? Part of this is identifying the problem your technology solves. If it's a real problem, expect to find people using cobbled-together solutions that your technology would replace, but few if any direct competitors. When people ask about your "competition", if you only see things you'd be replacing, that's your competition, as in "that which people would not spend money on so they can spend money on your solution instead". (Even if you wind up creating value and wealth for the entire world in the long term, in the short term peoples' budgets are effectively zero-sum. If your solution would only cost the price of a pizza a month, you need to actually prove that those who would have bought that pizza would benefit more from buying your product or service.) Another part is getting experimental proof ASAP - even of a relatively inefficient, weaksauce prototype. If someone were to demonstrate a 1-watt desktop fusion reactor, you wouldn't seriously expect a multi-MW commercial plant to be nothing more than millions of those 1-watt prototypes, right? You'd expect that there would be serious engineering to efficiently scale up to such volume. Same thing here. Many funding sources want demonstration that you can in fact get customer interest; actual sales and paying customers work best, but letters of interest (actual potential customers signing paper that says "if you were to build X to specs Y then I would pay $Z") may also suffice. Also, if you can build small there often become other uses. If you can scale from 1-watt desktop plants to multi-MW installations, could you also create portable multi-KW vehicular power sources? These would be more expensive, but you would need less money to build your first one; could selling these help raise funds to build that multi-MW plant? Think of it as micro-financial engineering: the investors might not be able to fund that multi-MW installation, but they might be able to fund a few of those multi-KW engines until your business is profitable, at which point your business itself can eventually fund the multi-MW installations. This financial efficiency often comes at the cost of technical efficiency. Economies of scale mean that larger installations cost much less per unit output...but only if you have the funds to make that larger installation, which you do not at first. Remember that you're probably selling at first to those with more resources? This is why. They're basically covering your inefficiency so that you can make the thing at all, until you have enough resources to build large and be efficient. Granted, this means that you have to have more benefit than just delivering a commodity for cheaper - but if your technology is truly that impressive, it probably does have more benefits. Try not to depend on government financial sources. Unless there is a specific, short term announcement that you are planning to bid on, chances are they can't be interested, whether or not they should be. (I know, "can't be" is unusual phrasing here, but it's more accurate than "aren't" - though "aren't allowed, by their bosses and regulations, to be" would be accurate.) In particular, don't depend on multi-year government contracts: few governments are able to sign and then stick to them. (Elected governments, such as most Western ones, have new legislators and executives every so often that reevaluate them; other governments have their own problems.) That said, it doesn't hurt to look around and see what funding opportunities are currently open or are about to be; http://www.fbo.gov/ is one good place to start looking. So yeah, just some thoughts. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Sun Aug 23 23:39:23 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2015 18:39:23 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Old Nutrition Studies In-Reply-To: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> References: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> Message-ID: Harvey Newstrom Much appreciated. bill w On Sun, Aug 23, 2015 at 10:44 AM, Harvey Newstrom wrote: > The China study is old. It started in 1983 and measured variables of diet > known at the time. We know a lot more now. Nobody should be taking their > advice from such an old study. The question of whether this study was > "right" or "wrong" is irrelevant. We know a lot more nuance about > nutrition now than we did then. So arguing whether this study was right or > wrong misses the point about whether we should eat meat, fat, cholesterol, > or turn vegetarian. > > Here are some examples of what has changed since the China study and other > similar older studies. > > 1. Early statistics seemed to show that meat causes cancer. People who > ate meat get cancer at statistically higher rates than people who didn't > eat meat. So it made sense to avoid meat. > > However, correlation does not mean causation. Later studies subdivided > variables to try to isolate how and why meat causes cancer. It turns out > that cooking method was one of the big factors in this. Charring meat with > heat creates carcinogens. If we cook meat without charring it, we avoid > the creation of most of these carcinogens. > > Does that mean the original studies were wrong and meat did not cause > cancer? I say no. As a whole, most meat really was causing cancer. But > does this mean that the study was right and should we stop eating meat to > avoid cancer? Again, no. We now know how to cook meat to avoid these > charring induced carcinogens. Does that mean reality changed or the > studies keep flip-flopping? No, we learn more and more and keep further > refining our nutritional understanding. This is not the same as being > wrong or changing our theories all the time. We are actually continually > improving our theories so that they get better and better over time. > > 2. Early statistics seemed to show that cholesterol clogs arteries > leading to heart attacks. People who had higher blood cholesterol levels > get clogged arteries and have heart attacks at statistically higher rates > than people who don't. So it made sense to avoid dietary cholesterol. > > However, correlation does not mean causation. Later studies subdivided > variables even further. It turns out that dietary cholesterol is very > small and does not raise blood cholesterol as much as other dietary factors > that raise cholesterol. Eating cholesterol containing foods such as eggs > and shellfish turns out to not raise blood cholesterol very much. However, > eating lots of saturated fats and refined carbohydrates turns out to > skyrocket cholesterol and related compounds like triglycerides. > > We also know that there are different kinds of cholesterol, HDL (good) > cholesterol and LDL (bad) cholesterol and other kinds of cholesterol. Most > people have the bad kind, so most early studies found the bad results. But > some people who measured "high cholesterol" actually had low bad > cholesterol and high good cholesterol. Such people actually had better > results they higher their good cholesterol got. So any old study (such as > the China study) that simply measures "cholesterol" without distinguishing > the good from the bad is practically useless. We don't know what they were > measuring. We don't know if differences were in the good or bad kind. We > don't correlate which changes caused which results. > > Does that mean the original studies were wrong and cholesterol did not > cause heart attacks? I say no. As a whole, most high cholesterol readings > were the bad cholesterol which really was causing heart attacks. But does > this mean that the study was right and should we stop eating cholesterol or > use blood cholesterol levels to predict heart attacks? Again, no. We now > know that total cholesterol does not indicate good or bad predictions. We > now look at different cholesterol levels and the ratios between them for > better measures. Again, we are not changing the theories about > cholesterol. We are further refining our nutritional understanding of how > different cholesterols effect the cardiovascular system. > > 3. There are similar examples with eating a high fat diet. We now know > that there are good fats and bad fats. Early studies did not distinguish > between good fats and bad fats. We now know that some fats should be > decreased in the diet while others should be increased. It is too > simplistic to argue whether "fat" is good or bad. > > 4. A related example of refining our knowledge occurred with butter vs. > margarine. Scientists were correct when they statistically correlated > saturated fat with heart attacks. They suggested that people switch from > butter to vegetable oils. So many people did. And many people started > having more problems than before. Were the scientists wrong? Not really. > We now know that most vegetable oil margarines are hydrogenated, making > them even more super-saturated than the saturated fats. They also induced > more trans fats, which is also a very bad dietary fat. So while scientists > recommended that people switch to vegetable oils to eat less saturated far, > people actually switched to hydrogenated vegetable oils which were even > more saturated fat than before. While it was mistakenly believed that > people were eating less saturated fat, they were actually eating much more > saturated fat. We now know a lot more about the whole spectrum of fats. > And we know that hydrogenated oil! > s in margarines are worse than saturated fats in the same way that > saturated fats are worse than natural vegetable oils. > > 5. There are older studies that found that the autopsied brains of people > who ate soy had more dementia indications than people who did not eat soy. > However it was later found that the people who ate soy were living longer. > So what they really found was that older people have more dementia > indications than younger people. When correlated for age, people who eat > soy do not have more dementia indications than people who do not eat soy. > > 6. There was a recent theory that too much estrogen might cause hormone > problems for males and that soy contains a pseudo-estrogen. So people > stopped drinking soy milk and switched back to cow's milk. Then it was > realized that cow's milk has a magnitude more times real estrogen than soy > has pseudo estrogens. If people really wanted to avoid estrogen, they > should stop drinking cow's milk and switch to soy milk. > > My point with these various examples is that science works over time and > keeps getting better and better. But it's not perfect. We cannot argue > whether an older study is right or wrong. The answer is almost always more > nuanced and has to be subdivided into other better questions about what was > right and what was wrong. Ideas about increasing or decreasing a single > food group (meat, grains, dairy) or a single macronutrient (fat, protein, > carbs) are usually too simplistic. The more we study these questions, the > more they fragment into many more precise questions until the original > question becomes meaningless. > > Are carbs good or bad? Is fat good or bad? Is meat good or bad? Is > vegetarianism better or worse? Is veganism better or worse? All of these > are invalid questions. Depending what kinds of carbs, fats, meats, > vegetarian diet or vegan diet you choose, you can answer these questions > either way. > > And the answer to the question about whether any particular study is good > or bad should be approach by looking at further refined studies. It almost > never can be answered by deciding if the study is good (and accepting all > of its conclusions) or deciding that a study is bad (and rejecting all of > its conclusions). Both of these extreme edge-case positions is almost > always wrong. > > -- > Harvey Newstrom www.HarveyNewstrom.com > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Mon Aug 24 04:41:00 2015 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2015 21:41:00 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are (spike) Message-ID: On Sun, Aug 23, 2015 at 5:00 AM, "spike" wrote: >>...Is it safe to assume that advanced future computing will generate a lot > of waste heat?... BillK > _______________________________________________ > > If they actually do anything, photons do create waste heat. The third law > applies to them as well. > > But we know what you meant: photons are a way more efficient way to transfer > signals than pushing electrons down a wire: entropy production is way lower. > > The reason I focus on your comment is not to strain at gnats BillK, but > rather because I have really been pondering how to calculate temperature > gradients in an MBrain using entropy. This has been a concern of mine since the subject first came up--hmm, more than two decades ago. You want to do a lot of waste heat generations computing in a small space to minimize speed of light delays. But you have to have a large area to radiate the heat. Black box, if it was in space, it would be sunlight in one side and low temperature thermal radiation out the other. You can't do more computation per square meter than can be supported by the energy you can harvest from that square meter. The alternative is to make concentrated power and use small scale intensely cooled hardware. But I suspect that on a large scale, you can't do better than whatever limit is set by computer sandwiched between a sunlight converter surface and a radiator. > If I can bound the problem using the > third law, we might at least get a best-case scenario. This technique is > what led me to the insight that MBrains would overheat unless you reflect > most of the energy out of the system. > > By my understanding of entropy and the third law of thermodynamics, an > MBrain not only has the option of turning its star into a photon rocket, it > is required to do so. If that notion is correct, then an MBrain would be > detectable. That we don't see one is evidence that MBrains do not currently > exist, or if so, there aren't many of them. > > That is an insight I regret Robert Bradbury did not live long enough for me > to share with him, for I didn't discover it until a few months after his > untimely passing. I wonder if it would be useful to set up a Skype chat room to discuss these problems? Keith > spike From spike66 at att.net Mon Aug 24 16:11:02 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2015 09:11:02 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are (spike) In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <009901d0de87$7d812030$78836090$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Keith Henson ... > >>... The reason I focus on your comment is not to strain at gnats BillK, > but rather because I have really been pondering how to calculate > temperature gradients in an MBrain using entropy. >... But I suspect that on a large scale, you can't do better than whatever limit is set by computer sandwiched between a sunlight converter surface and a radiator. Ja. The notion of required low-entropy energy reflection is based on an assumption of passive cooling only, with no fluid flow heat transfer. Robert never liked that idea, for he was a big fan of (or believer in) strong nanotech. I would like to accept the notion, but I had in mind a device which could produce MBrain nodes using current or almost current technology. If Skylon flies, we could start launching them in our lifetimes. Robert might argue that the MBrain concept depends on strong nanotech and perhaps strong AI, but I have envisioned an MBrain concept which could predate both, or could exist even if some unknown-unknown makes strong AI and strong nanotech impossible. >...I wonder if it would be useful to set up a Skype chat room to discuss these problems? Keith Perhaps, but having everything in text has its advantages too. spike From ilia.stambler at gmail.com Tue Aug 25 13:25:30 2015 From: ilia.stambler at gmail.com (Ilia Stambler) Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2015 16:25:30 +0300 Subject: [ExI] The book - "A History of Life-extensionism in the Twentieth Century" - is now made freely available on line Message-ID: Dear friends, I am happy and proud to present to you my book on the history of longevity science ? ?A History of Life-extensionism in the Twentieth Century? ? which is now *freely available from my site*, in html and pdf formats http://www.longevityhistory.com/ Also reduced to the possible minimum the price for the hard copy to make it more available for placing at university and community libraries, from http://www.amazon.com/History-Life-Extensionism-Twentieth-Century/dp/1500818577/ I hope this book will provide a valuable resource on life-extension science. It surveys the development of the field in the course of over a century in major national contexts ? France (Chapter 1), Germany, Austria, Romania and Switzerland (Chapter 2), Russia and Ukraine (Chapter 3), the US and UK (Chapter 4). It includes almost 1300 bibliographic notes, each including several up to dozens annotated references (often hyper-linked), in several languages ? mainly English, French, Russian and German. The title refers to the 20th century, but in fact, the book includes extensive information and references on very recent developments, up to the end of 2014, as well as information on early modern, medieval and ancient developments. The main text refers to over 700 authors and actors, and over 2,000 leading authors are cited in the References and Notes section. The book provides a broad history of the scientific and technological ideas on life extension, but also of social and ideological determinants of this pursuit. So it is a kind of encyclopedia of life extension science history, and as such I hope it can be of interest and utility to people interested in this field ? not only to increase education in the field, but also to provide motivation to enter and pursue the field. The book was highly reviewed by distinguished researchers of aging and longevity, and of society, science and emerging technologies. (Some comments can be found on the book cover and among the reviews on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/History-Life-Extensionism-Twentieth-Century/dp/1500818577/ ) One of the central arguments of this book is that not only life extension science is a legitimate and honorable scientific pursuit, but in fact it has been indispensable and instrumental for the development of so called ?conventional? medicine, for the emergence of very tangible everyday therapies that we use now. And it holds similar, or greater, promise for the future. This argument was summarized in the articles ?The Unexpected Outcomes of Anti-Aging, Rejuvenation, and Life Extension Studies: An Origin of Modern Therapies? (*Rejuvenation Research*, 2014 http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/rej.2013.1527 ), and ?Has aging ever been considered healthy?? (*Frontiers in Genetics. Genetics of Aging*, 2015 http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fgene.2015.00202/full ). (These articles are also in free access). But it is much more thoroughly substantiated in the entire book. I do hope this book will contribute to education and legitimization of longevity science, as well as to encourage more people to enter the field. Will be grateful for any reviews, feedback, and for referring this book to those who may find it of interest and use. Hoping this book will contribute to our struggle for healthy longevity for all. The distribution of this book is a part of the campaign to raise awareness about the importance of aging and longevity research for the development of healthcare toward October 1 ? the UN International Day of Older Persons (also referred to by some as the International Longevity Day). Additional actions, events and promotions are very welcome! http://www.longevityforall.org/international-longevity-day-october-1-2015/ Thankfully yours, Ilia -- Ilia Stambler, PhD Outreach Coordinator. International Society on Aging and Disease - ISOAD http://isoad.org Chair. Israeli Longevity Alliance / International Longevity Alliance (Israel) - ILA *http://www.longevityisrael.org/ * Coordinator. Longevity for All http://www.longevityforall.org Author. Longevity History. *A History of Life-Extensionism in the Twentieth Century* http://longevityhistory.com Email: ilia.stambler at gmail.com Tel: 972-3-961-4296 / 0522-283-578 Rishon Lezion. Israel -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jasonresch at gmail.com Mon Aug 24 03:46:29 2015 From: jasonresch at gmail.com (Jason Resch) Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2015 22:46:29 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Old Nutrition Studies In-Reply-To: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> References: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> Message-ID: Harvey, I appreciate your e-mail. You are correct that too much nutritional advice has been proffered based on weak correlational studies (or worse). I have attached a presentation I put together showing how the "avoid fat to reduce heart attack risk" really blew up in our collective faces and is perhaps largely to blame for the current diabetes/obesity rates in the United States. All are welcome to share this presentation with anyone. Note: Many comments/citations are in the "notes" view which you may only see if opened in PowerPoint. My only contention with what you say below is that according to the largest meta-study to date, it appears that saturated fats are harmless. Jason On Sun, Aug 23, 2015 at 10:44 AM, Harvey Newstrom wrote: > The China study is old. It started in 1983 and measured variables of diet > known at the time. We know a lot more now. Nobody should be taking their > advice from such an old study. The question of whether this study was > "right" or "wrong" is irrelevant. We know a lot more nuance about > nutrition now than we did then. So arguing whether this study was right or > wrong misses the point about whether we should eat meat, fat, cholesterol, > or turn vegetarian. > > Here are some examples of what has changed since the China study and other > similar older studies. > > 1. Early statistics seemed to show that meat causes cancer. People who > ate meat get cancer at statistically higher rates than people who didn't > eat meat. So it made sense to avoid meat. > > However, correlation does not mean causation. Later studies subdivided > variables to try to isolate how and why meat causes cancer. It turns out > that cooking method was one of the big factors in this. Charring meat with > heat creates carcinogens. If we cook meat without charring it, we avoid > the creation of most of these carcinogens. > > Does that mean the original studies were wrong and meat did not cause > cancer? I say no. As a whole, most meat really was causing cancer. But > does this mean that the study was right and should we stop eating meat to > avoid cancer? Again, no. We now know how to cook meat to avoid these > charring induced carcinogens. Does that mean reality changed or the > studies keep flip-flopping? No, we learn more and more and keep further > refining our nutritional understanding. This is not the same as being > wrong or changing our theories all the time. We are actually continually > improving our theories so that they get better and better over time. > > 2. Early statistics seemed to show that cholesterol clogs arteries > leading to heart attacks. People who had higher blood cholesterol levels > get clogged arteries and have heart attacks at statistically higher rates > than people who don't. So it made sense to avoid dietary cholesterol. > > However, correlation does not mean causation. Later studies subdivided > variables even further. It turns out that dietary cholesterol is very > small and does not raise blood cholesterol as much as other dietary factors > that raise cholesterol. Eating cholesterol containing foods such as eggs > and shellfish turns out to not raise blood cholesterol very much. However, > eating lots of saturated fats and refined carbohydrates turns out to > skyrocket cholesterol and related compounds like triglycerides. > > We also know that there are different kinds of cholesterol, HDL (good) > cholesterol and LDL (bad) cholesterol and other kinds of cholesterol. Most > people have the bad kind, so most early studies found the bad results. But > some people who measured "high cholesterol" actually had low bad > cholesterol and high good cholesterol. Such people actually had better > results they higher their good cholesterol got. So any old study (such as > the China study) that simply measures "cholesterol" without distinguishing > the good from the bad is practically useless. We don't know what they were > measuring. We don't know if differences were in the good or bad kind. We > don't correlate which changes caused which results. > > Does that mean the original studies were wrong and cholesterol did not > cause heart attacks? I say no. As a whole, most high cholesterol readings > were the bad cholesterol which really was causing heart attacks. But does > this mean that the study was right and should we stop eating cholesterol or > use blood cholesterol levels to predict heart attacks? Again, no. We now > know that total cholesterol does not indicate good or bad predictions. We > now look at different cholesterol levels and the ratios between them for > better measures. Again, we are not changing the theories about > cholesterol. We are further refining our nutritional understanding of how > different cholesterols effect the cardiovascular system. > > 3. There are similar examples with eating a high fat diet. We now know > that there are good fats and bad fats. Early studies did not distinguish > between good fats and bad fats. We now know that some fats should be > decreased in the diet while others should be increased. It is too > simplistic to argue whether "fat" is good or bad. > > 4. A related example of refining our knowledge occurred with butter vs. > margarine. Scientists were correct when they statistically correlated > saturated fat with heart attacks. They suggested that people switch from > butter to vegetable oils. So many people did. And many people started > having more problems than before. Were the scientists wrong? Not really. > We now know that most vegetable oil margarines are hydrogenated, making > them even more super-saturated than the saturated fats. They also induced > more trans fats, which is also a very bad dietary fat. So while scientists > recommended that people switch to vegetable oils to eat less saturated far, > people actually switched to hydrogenated vegetable oils which were even > more saturated fat than before. While it was mistakenly believed that > people were eating less saturated fat, they were actually eating much more > saturated fat. We now know a lot more about the whole spectrum of fats. > And we know that hydrogenated oil! > s in margarines are worse than saturated fats in the same way that > saturated fats are worse than natural vegetable oils. > > 5. There are older studies that found that the autopsied brains of people > who ate soy had more dementia indications than people who did not eat soy. > However it was later found that the people who ate soy were living longer. > So what they really found was that older people have more dementia > indications than younger people. When correlated for age, people who eat > soy do not have more dementia indications than people who do not eat soy. > > 6. There was a recent theory that too much estrogen might cause hormone > problems for males and that soy contains a pseudo-estrogen. So people > stopped drinking soy milk and switched back to cow's milk. Then it was > realized that cow's milk has a magnitude more times real estrogen than soy > has pseudo estrogens. If people really wanted to avoid estrogen, they > should stop drinking cow's milk and switch to soy milk. > > My point with these various examples is that science works over time and > keeps getting better and better. But it's not perfect. We cannot argue > whether an older study is right or wrong. The answer is almost always more > nuanced and has to be subdivided into other better questions about what was > right and what was wrong. Ideas about increasing or decreasing a single > food group (meat, grains, dairy) or a single macronutrient (fat, protein, > carbs) are usually too simplistic. The more we study these questions, the > more they fragment into many more precise questions until the original > question becomes meaningless. > > Are carbs good or bad? Is fat good or bad? Is meat good or bad? Is > vegetarianism better or worse? Is veganism better or worse? All of these > are invalid questions. Depending what kinds of carbs, fats, meats, > vegetarian diet or vegan diet you choose, you can answer these questions > either way. > > And the answer to the question about whether any particular study is good > or bad should be approach by looking at further refined studies. It almost > never can be answered by deciding if the study is good (and accepting all > of its conclusions) or deciding that a study is bad (and rejecting all of > its conclusions). Both of these extreme edge-case positions is almost > always wrong. > > -- > Harvey Newstrom www.HarveyNewstrom.com > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Why We Should Question Conventional Dietary Advice.ppt Type: application/vnd.ms-powerpoint Size: 1161216 bytes Desc: not available URL: From jasonresch at gmail.com Mon Aug 24 04:03:55 2015 From: jasonresch at gmail.com (Jason Resch) Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2015 23:03:55 -0500 Subject: [ExI] book In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I highly recommend the book "Good Calories, Bad Calories". It's a long read, but perhaps one of the best-researched book on the subject of nutrition. That study with rats is deceptive. The rats were given such low amounts of dietary protein (below 5%), that they were not growing and dying of other causes. The cancer may have stopped growing in those rats, but it was because they were wasting away. This page explains the flaws of how the science was portrayed in The China Study: http://www.westonaprice.org/health-topics/abcs-of-nutrition/the-china-study-myth/ Jason On Sat, Aug 22, 2015 at 2:10 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > Have any of you read The China Study? It has just amazing findings in > it. A nutrition book not a diet book though he does recommend a whole > plant diet. I am mostly attracted to the paleo diet, but this book really > has made me think, esp. the low protein diet that stopped cancers in lab > rats. > > Opinions? > > Bill W > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Tue Aug 25 16:33:16 2015 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2015 09:33:16 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are Message-ID: On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 5:00 AM, "spike" wrote: > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf > Of Keith Henson > ... >>>... The reason I focus on your comment is not to strain at gnats BillK, >> but rather because I have really been pondering how to calculate >> temperature gradients in an MBrain using entropy. > >>... But I suspect that on a large scale, you can't do better than whatever > limit is set by computer sandwiched between a sunlight converter surface and > a radiator. > > Ja. The notion of required low-entropy energy reflection is based on an > assumption of passive cooling only, with no fluid flow heat transfer. > Robert never liked that idea, for he was a big fan of (or believer in) > strong nanotech. You lost me there. The computation between the light receiving side and the radiator side can be anything from Apple IIs to the most advanced nanotech based computers possible without affecting the fundamental physics. That is set by the Stefan?Boltzmann law. I have been using a 20 kW/person power consumption for million to one faster uploaded humans. Powered by sunlight at more or less one AU, that's about 20 square meters per simulation or 50,000 per square km. The problem is that you can't talk to those further than about 300 meters away without (subjectively) long communication delays due to speed of light. That gives you a communicating social group of about 4500 simulated fast humans that you could "talk" to with a round trip communication delay of 2 seconds. For one day (newspaper) comm delays, the group size increases by (24 x 60 x 60)^2 or about 400 million. For a week (magazines) the group size goes up by a factor of 50. But if you want telephone type communications with millions of people, this kind of Mbrain won't do it. > I would like to accept the notion, but I had in mind a > device which could produce MBrain nodes using current or almost current > technology. If Skylon flies, we could start launching them in our > lifetimes. I am hard pressed to figure out why we would want to do this. > Robert might argue that the MBrain concept depends on strong nanotech and > perhaps strong AI, but I have envisioned an MBrain concept which could > predate both, or could exist even if some unknown-unknown makes strong AI > and strong nanotech impossible. > >>...I wonder if it would be useful to set up a Skype chat room to discuss > these problems? Keith > > Perhaps, but having everything in text has its advantages too. You can run Skype in IRC mode and get text. Keith > spike > > > > > ------------------------------ > > Subject: Digest Footer > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > > ------------------------------ > > End of extropy-chat Digest, Vol 143, Issue 13 > ********************************************* From sparge at gmail.com Tue Aug 25 16:58:29 2015 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2015 12:58:29 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Old Nutrition Studies In-Reply-To: References: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Aug 23, 2015 at 11:46 PM, Jason Resch wrote: > > I appreciate your e-mail. You are correct that too much nutritional advice > has been proffered based on weak correlational studies (or worse). I have > attached a presentation I put together showing how the "avoid fat to reduce > heart attack risk" really blew up in our collective faces and is perhaps > largely to blame for the current diabetes/obesity rates in the United > States. All are welcome to share this presentation with anyone. Note: Many > comments/citations are in the "notes" view which you may only see if opened > in PowerPoint. > Excellent presentation. Thanks! > My only contention with what you say below is that according to the > largest meta-study to date, it appears that saturated fats are harmless. > Agreed. -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Tue Aug 25 17:43:18 2015 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2015 13:43:18 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Tri Alpha Energy Message-ID: Tri Alpha Energy is about the most secretive publicity shy company around, they have 150 employees 140 million in the bank and no website; they've been around since 1998 but until recently all they've said it that they're trying to develop fusion power using the Hydrogen-Boron reaction which is one of the cleanest nuclear reaction known because it produces no neutrons and no radioactive isotopes. Also the reaction produces fast electrically charged particles so it can produce electricity directly, bypassing the need for steam turbines and generators. Boron and Hydrogen are very common elements too. Recently the company has opened up a bit and published papers showing that they have made real progress, they've confined plasma in field-reversed configuration (a sort of plasma smoke ring) at 10 million degrees Celsius and held it steady for 5 milliseconds, which is over 10 times longer than anybody has before. But there is still a long way to go. http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2015/08/secretive-fusion-company-makes-reactor-breakthrough http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2015/06/mystery-company-blazes-trail-fusion-energy John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Aug 25 19:24:56 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2015 14:24:56 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Old Nutrition Studies In-Reply-To: References: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> Message-ID: > > My only contention with what you say below is that according to the > largest meta-study to date, it appears that saturated fats are harmless. > ----------------- I'd like to also recommend Deep Nutrition, by Shanahan and Shanahan. Let's start cooking with lard, like most of our ancestors. Works for me. And no vegetable oils at all (olive oil excepted), esp. not heated ones. Also, Google '70% fat diet'. Amazing. (Yeah, right, I'm just learning.....) Bill W On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 11:58 AM, Dave Sill wrote: > On Sun, Aug 23, 2015 at 11:46 PM, Jason Resch > wrote: > >> >> I appreciate your e-mail. You are correct that too much nutritional >> advice has been proffered based on weak correlational studies (or worse). I >> have attached a presentation I put together showing how the "avoid fat to >> reduce heart attack risk" really blew up in our collective faces and is >> perhaps largely to blame for the current diabetes/obesity rates in the >> United States. All are welcome to share this presentation with anyone. >> Note: Many comments/citations are in the "notes" view which you may only >> see if opened in PowerPoint. >> > > Excellent presentation. Thanks! > > >> My only contention with what you say below is that according to the >> largest meta-study to date, it appears that saturated fats are harmless. >> > > Agreed. > > -Dave > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sparge at gmail.com Tue Aug 25 19:32:23 2015 From: sparge at gmail.com (Dave Sill) Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2015 15:32:23 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Old Nutrition Studies In-Reply-To: References: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 3:24 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > > I'd like to also recommend Deep Nutrition, by Shanahan and Shanahan. > Let's start cooking with lard, like most of our ancestors. Works for me. > And no vegetable oils at all (olive oil excepted), esp. not heated ones. > Coconut oil is good, too. -Dave -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From foozler83 at gmail.com Tue Aug 25 19:38:06 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2015 14:38:06 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Old Nutrition Studies In-Reply-To: References: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> Message-ID: Coconut oil is good, too. -Dave Hmm - is a coconut a vegetable or a fruit. No matter, you are right according to my sources. With you all's help (sorry, Southern USA guy here) I am now totally at odds with The China Study and all its recommendations. Bring on the meat and fat. bill w On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 2:32 PM, Dave Sill wrote: > On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 3:24 PM, William Flynn Wallace < > foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote: > >> >> I'd like to also recommend Deep Nutrition, by Shanahan and Shanahan. >> Let's start cooking with lard, like most of our ancestors. Works for me. >> And no vegetable oils at all (olive oil excepted), esp. not heated ones. >> > > Coconut oil is good, too. > > -Dave > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Tue Aug 25 23:22:01 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Tue, 25 Aug 2015 16:22:01 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <02d301d0df8c$dbd3a300$937ae900$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Keith Henson ... > >>... The notion of required low-entropy energy reflection is based on > an assumption of passive cooling only, with no fluid flow heat transfer. > Robert never liked that idea, for he was a big fan of (or believer in) > strong nanotech. >...You lost me there. The computation between the light receiving side and the radiator side can be anything from Apple IIs to the most advanced nanotech based computers possible without affecting the fundamental physics. That is set by the Stefan?Boltzmann law... Ja thanks Keith; I didn't make that very clear. Robert and I branched in our thinking on MBrains. He was thinking of MBrain nodes which are post-strong nanotech, and consequently was imagining very complex nodes. I went down a different branch, by assuming (do suspend disbelief for this exercise) that we want to create a proto-MBrain using current (or clearly foreseeable) manufacturing technology and computing technology. To do something like that, we would perhaps set up a manufacturing plant on an asteroid, entirely autonomous and possibly remote control. I am judging it unlikely we would be able to support human life there. The asteroid-based plant would make the MBrain nodes using indigenous materials and launch them. It doesn't take much delta V to get a node into interplanetary orbit from an asteroid. Granted it would take a remarkable stretch in our space-technology to build something like an MBrain node factory on an asteroid, but given a sufficiently simple node, I think we could do it with currently-foreseeable technology. Probably not with any design which requires active cooling, fluid flow, anything like that. >>... If Skylon flies, we could start launching them in our lifetimes... >...I am hard pressed to figure out why we would want to do this. Use them to mine bitcoins? I don't know Keith, but I can imagine if we can create some kind of space-based factory to set a few billion space based microprocessors going with no cost to us, we should be able to think of some use for that capability. This could predate nanotech and uploading, could predate the singularity (assuming there is not some unknown unknown which precludes both uploading and the singularity (and do let us hope there are no fundamental reasons why those notions are impossible (for the sake of ourselves and our fellow cryonauts.))) >> ...Perhaps, but having everything in text has its advantages too. >...You can run Skype in IRC mode and get text...Keith Cool thanks, I was not aware of that. Keith I am far too not hip on these modern tricks you young guys are using. spike From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Aug 26 08:00:11 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 04:00:11 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Sat, Aug 22, 2015 at 1:03 PM, spike wrote: > > > If they actually do anything, photons do create waste heat. The third law > applies to them as well. ### In other words: People who compute a lot inevitably change the radiation signature of the space they inhabit. Since we do not see any area in the sky whose heat signature hints at massive scale computation, there is no massive scale computation in our past light cone. Therefore, eaties do not exist, or if they do, every single one of them computes little, or else they compute a lot but are very uncommon. I cannot come up with an universal, non-contrived physical/biological/social law that would prohibit absolutely every highly evolved mind in the universe from ever massively computing. Therefore, I do strongly believe eaties do not exist, or else, they are very uncommon. If they exist, they are most likely expanding at near light-speed, so their radiation signature would remain undetectable until right before they show up in our neighborhood (i.e. they are in a very thin slice of our past light cone). The undetectability of eaties puts very stringent limits on the likelihood of their existence. Rafa? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Wed Aug 26 08:47:15 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 09:47:15 +0100 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> Message-ID: On 26 August 2015 at 09:00, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > On Sat, Aug 22, 2015 at 1:03 PM, spike wrote: >> If they actually do anything, photons do create waste heat. The third law >> applies to them as well. > > ### In other words: People who compute a lot inevitably change the radiation > signature of the space they inhabit. > > Since we do not see any area in the sky whose heat signature hints at > massive scale computation, there is no massive scale computation in our past > light cone. > > Therefore, eaties do not exist, or if they do, every single one of them > computes little, or else they compute a lot but are very uncommon. > Or, as Keith mentioned, eaties are *small*. Speed of light limits internal communication size. And waste heat might be used for other purposes. Maintenance of an intelligence system requires more than just white-hot computation. BillK From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Wed Aug 26 09:37:05 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 05:37:05 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 4:47 AM, BillK wrote: > > > Or, as Keith mentioned, eaties are *small*. > > Speed of light limits internal communication size. And waste heat > might be used for other purposes. Maintenance of an intelligence > system requires more than just white-hot computation. > ### A lot of small people will produce a large impact. Ergo, if there is no large impact, there are few if any small people. Rafa? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Wed Aug 26 14:54:14 2015 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 10:54:14 -0400 Subject: [ExI] hal finney and gimps, was: RE: New pentagon tiling discovered In-Reply-To: <00ad01d0d9d7$ed7cf5d0$c876e170$@att.net> References: <00ad01d0d9d7$ed7cf5d0$c876e170$@att.net> Message-ID: On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 1:04 PM, spike wrote: > ?> ? > Hal Finney read our Mersenne Prime as currency discussion, then went off > and invented BitCoin. ?Nobody knows ?for sure but the general consensus is that (probably) either Hal did or Nick Szabo ? did, and both were once members of this list.? Nick Szabo ? was pretty active in 1996 and I talked with him a lot back then. Time flies. John K Clark > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From listsb at infinitefaculty.org Wed Aug 26 15:13:29 2015 From: listsb at infinitefaculty.org (Brian Manning Delaney) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 17:13:29 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Old Nutrition Studies In-Reply-To: References: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> Message-ID: <55DDD799.8070806@infinitefaculty.org> El 2015-08-24 a las 05:46, Jason Resch escribi?: > My only contention with what you say below is that according to the > largest meta-study to date, it appears that saturated fats are harmless. Which study is that? Thanks, Brian From foozler83 at gmail.com Wed Aug 26 15:50:26 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 10:50:26 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Old Nutrition Studies In-Reply-To: <55DDD799.8070806@infinitefaculty.org> References: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> <55DDD799.8070806@infinitefaculty.org> Message-ID: On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 10:13 AM, Brian Manning Delaney < listsb at infinitefaculty.org> wrote: > > El 2015-08-24 a las 05:46, Jason Resch escribi?: > >> My only contention with what you say below is that according to the >> largest meta-study to date, it appears that saturated fats are harmless. >> > > Which study is that? > > Thanks, > Brian ?I'll answer that: P.W. Piri-Tarino, etc. "Meta analysis of Prospective Cohort studies? ?Evaluating the Association of Saturated Fat with Cardiovascular Disease." American Journal of clinical Nutrition 91, no.3 March 2010 535-46 340,000 Ss, 21 studies As Grain Brain says: page 80 - " intake of saturated fat was not associated with an increased risk of coronary disease, stroke, or cardiovascular disease" Other studies show that cholesterol intake does not correlate with cholesterol levels.? Saturated fat intake is actually causing (excuse me, correlated with) a 19% decrease in heart disease. So I am going back to red meat (but not franks, ham, bacon, sausage, bologna, etc.). bill w > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Aug 26 16:23:16 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 09:23:16 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> Message-ID: <013901d0e01b$87c15e80$97441b80$@att.net> >? On Behalf Of Rafal Smigrodzki Subject: Re: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are On Sat, Aug 22, 2015 at 1:03 PM, spike wrote: >?If they actually do anything, photons do create waste heat. The third law applies to them as well. ### In other words: People who compute a lot inevitably change the radiation signature of the space they inhabit. ?The undetectability of eaties puts very stringent limits on the likelihood of their existence?Rafa? Ja. I worry about it too much perhaps, because every theoretical path I can imagine ends up in severe cognitive dissonance, including the one that holds that intelligent life is one part per trillion in the universe, or that we are the first intelligent life to evolve. That is more mind-boggling to me than the notion that we are missing something fundamental in our understanding of how an advance civilization would carry itself and the observability of a distant advanced civilizations and how the third law of thermodynamics would apply to an MBrain, etc. Rafal I just can?t get my head around the notion that we are the first ones here. I know someone somewhere somewhen has to be first. I can imagine the first people to cross the Bering Strait must have wondered where are all the others. But I just can?t quite grasp the notion we are those people, the first ones to cross the Strait into advanced technology, and if we are, think of where that puts those of us special privileged life forms who are technology groksters. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Aug 26 16:31:46 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 09:31:46 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> Message-ID: <014801d0e01c$b702e230$2508a690$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of BillK ... >... And waste heat might be used for other purposes. ...BillK _______________________________________________ BillK, I am at the point where I can't really advance any further in MBrain theory until we can be sure we fully understand all the implications of the third law of thermodynamics. Waste heat is high entropy. This fundamentally limits what it can be used for. As I understand it now, entropy might form a limiting factor more than any other physical limits to growth. spike From spike66 at att.net Wed Aug 26 16:41:38 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 09:41:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: hal finney and gimps, was: RE: New pentagon tiling discovered In-Reply-To: References: <00ad01d0d9d7$ed7cf5d0$c876e170$@att.net> Message-ID: <014901d0e01e$17a2f2a0$46e8d7e0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark Subject: [Bulk] Re: [ExI] hal finney and gimps, was: RE: New pentagon tiling discovered On Tue, Aug 18, 2015 at 1:04 PM, spike wrote: ?> ? Hal Finney read our Mersenne Prime as currency discussion, then went off and invented BitCoin. ?>?Nobody knows ?for sure but the general consensus is that (probably) either Hal did or Nick Szabo did, and both were once members of this list.?..Nick Szabo was pretty active in 1996 and I talked with him a lot back then. Time flies. John K Clark John, as I remember it, Nick didn?t post much here; I only vaguely recall him. But in those days I wasn?t posting to ExI, only reading. Where is Nick now? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From clementlawyer at gmail.com Wed Aug 26 17:14:58 2015 From: clementlawyer at gmail.com (James Clement) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 10:14:58 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Old Nutrition Studies In-Reply-To: References: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> Message-ID: On Sun, Aug 23, 2015 at 8:46 PM, Jason Resch wrote: > > My only contention with what you say below is that according to the > largest meta-study to date, it appears that saturated fats are harmless. > > > I'm a quantified selfer, and have spent the past few years extensively reading nutrition studies (Calorie Restriction, Fasting, Ketogenic, Vegetarian/Vegan, Paleolithic, etc.), as well as most of the popular health books including Taubes, Sears, Cordain, Campbell, Wolf, Mosley, Perlmutter, Sinatra, Volek & Phinney, Lustig, McDougal, and McDonald . From 2013 to 2014 I read over 2,500 papers. One thing that I noticed is that every data set has outliers and while many variables are statistically significant for particular biomarkers, there are always huge numbers of outliers. In my own case, I've had my whole genome sequenced since 2009 and myself, sister, parents, and other relatives 23andMe'd since 2010, and we all have a genetic propensity towards Type II Diabetes. For the past several years I've been taking my blood sugar measurements many times a day (fasting, and immediately before and after meals) with a goal of achieving early morning fasting blood sugar readings of 70 - 85 mg/dL and post-meal spikes of no more than 120 mg/dL. I've been repeatedly surprised how small amounts of carbohydrates on one day can raise my blood sugar the next morning and throw it off for as much as 24 hours (e.g., goodbye my nightly microbrewed beer). I also take my cholesterol measurements once a week (as soon as I wake up, fasted) using CardioChek , which can measure Total Cholesterol, HDL, and Triglycerides. My father (age 81) has super low LDL and high HDL, is thin, but has had two bypass operations in his life. My mother has had high LDL and low HDL all of her life (Total Chol over 300) and has no heart problems at 82 years of age. Saturated fats (in my case coconut oil and high saturated-fat nuts) cause a very significant increase in LDL cholesterol (measured by subtracting HDL from Total Choles). I've proven this over and over to myself, by varying only the saturated fat I'm eating and seeing what happens. I personally think that LDL Particle Size , C-Reactive Protein, Homocysteine, Triglycerides, and blood sugar are far bigger risk factors for coronary disease than total cholesterol. LDL particle size may end up being the most important as having a LDL Type A profile (large, fluffy particles) put one at much less risk for CVD than does Type B profile (small, dense particles). Other than blood sugar (which is part of the general CBC), however, none of these tests are generally requested by doctors, even for people who have heart trouble, despite their relevance to CVD risk. LEF and LabCorp both sell such tests DTC, however. The upshot is that I don't think a single rule, such as "saturated fats are bad" or "eating low carbs is good" (or their reverse) can apply to everyone, when for any genetic risk there are usually 1/3 to 2/3 of humans who have different variants from those of the favorable-risk group. I think that people who want to really control their health need to read as much as they can about the latest health information (from scientists or those summarizing scientific work) and then test themselves rigorously and frequently. In this regard, I think Mark Cuban was completely correct. Best regards, James -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Wed Aug 26 17:24:15 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 10:24:15 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: <013901d0e01b$87c15e80$97441b80$@att.net> References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> <013901d0e01b$87c15e80$97441b80$@att.net> Message-ID: <017201d0e024$0bd4e310$237ea930$@att.net> From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of spike >?But I just can?t quite grasp the notion we are those people, the first ones to cross the Strait into advanced technology, and if we are, think of where that puts those of us special privileged life forms who are technology groksters?spike Come now, just try to grasp the notion please. What if? we really are the first and only technology-enabled species in this whooooole biiiiig daaaam plaaaace, right here in this whooole unimaginably biiiig daaaam time, this entire observable universe? Gaze into some of the Hubble deep space images and just try to get your head around that. If it is true, then just think of where on the evolutionary scale we place the exceedingly rare us: we of the astonishing good fortune, the ones who have access to these modern information streams, these life forms reading this paragraph, this sentence, this phrase, this this. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From pharos at gmail.com Wed Aug 26 17:46:07 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 18:46:07 +0100 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> Message-ID: On 26 August 2015 at 10:37, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > ### A lot of small people will produce a large impact. Ergo, if there is no > large impact, there are few if any small people. > In effect that is just claiming that you believe nanoscale aliens don't exist. One small computronium device could contain the equivalent of billions of intelligences. ('Equivalent' because we don't know how these devices will be structured). You have to also claim that if these small computronium devices do exist then there must be billions clustered together so that we can detect them. Just because we can't detect them, doesn't mean they are not around. BillK From pharos at gmail.com Wed Aug 26 17:49:37 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 18:49:37 +0100 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: <014801d0e01c$b702e230$2508a690$@att.net> References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> <014801d0e01c$b702e230$2508a690$@att.net> Message-ID: On 26 August 2015 at 17:31, spike wrote: > > > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf > Of BillK > ... >>... And waste heat might be used for other purposes. ...BillK > _______________________________________________ > > BillK, I am at the point where I can't really advance any further in MBrain > theory until we can be sure we fully understand all the implications of the > third law of thermodynamics. Waste heat is high entropy. This > fundamentally limits what it can be used for. As I understand it now, > entropy might form a limiting factor more than any other physical limits to > growth. > > Well, at a basic level you can use waste heat to generate electricity. I'm sure that aliens with nanotech can do better than that. :) BillK From pharos at gmail.com Wed Aug 26 17:55:50 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 18:55:50 +0100 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: <017201d0e024$0bd4e310$237ea930$@att.net> References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> <013901d0e01b$87c15e80$97441b80$@att.net> <017201d0e024$0bd4e310$237ea930$@att.net> Message-ID: On 26 August 2015 at 18:24, spike wrote: > Come now, just try to grasp the notion please. What if? we really are the > first and only technology-enabled species in this whooooole biiiiig daaaam > plaaaace, right here in this whooole unimaginably biiiig daaaam time, this > entire observable universe? Gaze into some of the Hubble deep space images > and just try to get your head around that. If it is true, then just think > of where on the evolutionary scale we place the exceedingly rare us: we of > the astonishing good fortune, the ones who have access to these modern > information streams, these life forms reading this paragraph, this sentence, > this phrase, this this. > Of course, given the huge size of the universe, the worry is that many, many species have thought these exact words and then gone extinct. The optimistic claim is that they have just gone undetectable. BillK From msd001 at gmail.com Wed Aug 26 20:42:29 2015 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 16:42:29 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 1:46 PM, BillK wrote: > You have to also claim that if these small computronium devices do > exist then there must be billions clustered together so that we can > detect them. > > Just because we can't detect them, doesn't mean they are not around. until very recently, humans couldn't detect viruses - instead attributing disease to the punishments meted by displeased gods. I wonder if there is an analogue for all those unknowns that yet remain unknown. From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Thu Aug 27 03:05:38 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 23:05:38 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 1:46 PM, BillK wrote: > On 26 August 2015 at 10:37, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote: > > ### A lot of small people will produce a large impact. Ergo, if there is > no > > large impact, there are few if any small people. > > > > In effect that is just claiming that you believe nanoscale aliens don't > exist. > One small computronium device could contain the equivalent of billions > of intelligences. > ('Equivalent' because we don't know how these devices will be structured). > > You have to also claim that if these small computronium devices do > exist then there must be billions clustered together so that we can > detect them. > > Just because we can't detect them, doesn't mean they are not around. > > ### On the scale of the universe, the word "few" has different connotations. There could be countless trillions of nanoscale aliens out there, using up a millionth of the available energy flow and they might be completely undetectable by our technology. But, to believe that this is actually plausible and sustained over time, you would have to explain what prevents the aliens from growing to 2x trillion and to claim 2 millionths of the energy... then 4 x... you know the progression. I know, this has been belabored ad nauseam - Berserkers, space environmentalism, etc. are being trotted out as explanations for "invisible aliens all over the place". I do not find any of the explanations I heard to be plausible The least implausible explanation for the invisibility of aliens is still their extreme scarcity. And by scarcity I mean extreme low frequency of spacefaring civilization starts - on the order of less than one per galaxy cluster in the last couple of billion years and none before. Rafa? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Thu Aug 27 03:07:45 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 23:07:45 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: <017201d0e024$0bd4e310$237ea930$@att.net> References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> <013901d0e01b$87c15e80$97441b80$@att.net> <017201d0e024$0bd4e310$237ea930$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 1:24 PM, spike wrote: > > > > > *From:* extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] *On > Behalf Of *spike > > *>?*But I just can?t quite grasp the notion we are those people, the > first ones to cross the Strait into advanced technology, and if we are, > think of where that puts those of us special privileged life forms who are > technology groksters?spike > > > > > > Come now, just try to grasp the notion please. What if? we really are the > first and only technology-enabled species in this whooooole biiiiig daaaam > plaaaace, right here in this whooole unimaginably biiiig daaaam time, this > entire observable universe? Gaze into some of the Hubble deep space images > and just try to get your head around that. If it is true, then just think > of where on the evolutionary scale we place the exceedingly rare us: we of > the astonishing good fortune, the ones who have access to these modern > information streams, these life forms reading this paragraph, this > sentence, this phrase, this this. > ### Pure science magic and poetry, this! Rafa? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Aug 27 04:15:38 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 21:15:38 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> <013901d0e01b$87c15e80$97441b80$@att.net> <017201d0e024$0bd4e310$237ea930$@att.net> Message-ID: <05a901d0e07f$0aad43a0$2007cae0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of spike >?But I just can?t quite grasp the notion we are those people?we of the astonishing good fortune, the ones who have access to these modern information streams, these life forms reading this paragraph, this sentence, this phrase, this this. ### Pure science magic and poetry, this! Rafa? Thanks Rafal. Coming from you, the comment means a lot to me. Reason: you seem to be one of those people who can get his head around the mind-boggling concept that we really are alone, but I confess, it just eludes me. All throughout history, smart people have held the vague notion that now they pretty much understand what is going on: they read it in their holy books, or their level of science could explain most everything. But to the contrary, I am filled with cognitive dissonance, now more than ever. My cog-dis isn?t going away, it is getting worse over time. I know that my current understanding of the universe, of evolution, of reality utterly fails to explain why there aren?t signals out there from other advanced civilizations. My understanding fails to explain why the double slit experiment works the way it does. If fails to explain why space and time are quantized. Of all these, the failure to find cosmic signals bothers me the most: the others should be out there, and they should be detectable. Otherwise I and we are still missing something fundamental. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From listsb at infinitefaculty.org Thu Aug 27 05:22:24 2015 From: listsb at infinitefaculty.org (Brian Manning Delaney) Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 07:22:24 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Old Nutrition Studies In-Reply-To: References: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> <55DDD799.8070806@infinitefaculty.org> Message-ID: <55DE9E90.5020400@infinitefaculty.org> El 2015-08-26 a las 17:50, William Flynn Wallace escribi?: > ?I'll answer that: P.W. Piri-Tarino, etc. "Meta analysis of > Prospective Cohort studies? > ?Evaluating the Association of Saturated Fat with Cardiovascular > Disease." American Journal of clinical Nutrition 91, no.3 March 2010 > 535-46 340,000 Ss, 21 studies Take a look at the Medline entry for that study, and look at the comments, as well as -- if you have time; there are 21 -- the reviews among the 70 citing papers: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20071648 I wouldn't base my dietary choices on the conclusions reached. I'm not saying dietary SFA is evil; rather: we don't know. If I had to guess I'd say one would be better off with complex carbs and lots of MUFA and some PUFA. (It's also likely that SFA is a problem only above a certain chain length.) Can't wait until we have richer computer models of human physiology and can do virtual trials! James, how amazingly fortunate you are to have gotten a whole genome scan! And thank you for participating in the PGP. Your participation benefits us all. (I'm still trying to decide which health data tracking/storage system is best so that I can upload my health data.) I'm also testing blood glucose regularly. I'm less convinced we know how to interpret blood lipids, so I'm holding off on doing that frequently, but th science is pretty solid on the merits of keeping glucose down -- both avg. levels and spikes, possibly even very brief spikes (although CR rodents in the normal model of CR, where, for budgetary reasons, the animals are fed once a day, have huge, though fairly brief glucose spikes, but still live extremely long lives). Brian From atymes at gmail.com Thu Aug 27 05:47:06 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 22:47:06 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: <013901d0e01b$87c15e80$97441b80$@att.net> References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> <013901d0e01b$87c15e80$97441b80$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 9:23 AM, spike wrote: > But I just can?t quite grasp the notion we are those people, the first > ones to cross the Strait into advanced technology, and if we are, think of > where that puts those of us special privileged life forms who are > technology groksters. > As far as interacting with the people we interact with goes, we're in that position already. So you can just draw on your common, everyday experiences with this to imagine life in this position: it's the life we're living now, today. So just imagine if the life you already lead, being ahead of everyone you know of, was simply true on a larger scale than you had appreciated: you're not just ahead of most of the human race, you're ahead of just about everyone in existence. So what will you do with your advantage? There is no inherent duty, no required activity imposed by the universe. There simply is what you are. Congratulations, you rolled well so far; now what? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From clementlawyer at gmail.com Thu Aug 27 05:50:30 2015 From: clementlawyer at gmail.com (James Clement) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 22:50:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Old Nutrition Studies In-Reply-To: <55DE9E90.5020400@infinitefaculty.org> References: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> <55DDD799.8070806@infinitefaculty.org> <55DE9E90.5020400@infinitefaculty.org> Message-ID: Brian Manning Delaney wrote:.3 March 2010 > > James, how amazingly fortunate you are to have gotten a whole genome scan! > And thank you for participating in the PGP. Your participation benefits us > all. (I'm still trying to decide which health data tracking/storage system > is best so that I can upload my health data.) > > I'm also testing blood glucose regularly. I'm less convinced we know how > to interpret blood lipids, so I'm holding off on doing that frequently, but > th science is pretty solid on the merits of keeping glucose down -- both > avg. levels and spikes, possibly even very brief spikes (although CR > rodents in the normal model of CR, where, for budgetary reasons, the > animals are fed once a day, have huge, though fairly brief glucose spikes, > but still live extremely long lives). > > Brian Thanks Brian. I think one of the biggest reasons that Doctors don't test for LDL particle size or quantity is that there's no Rx for fixing such. It turns out that eating low-carb is probably the best thing you can do for reducing particle size and Triglycerides. From the papers I've read on this, it seems much more likely that small, dense particle size in high quantities is the culprit of CVD, but of course in genetics there's no "one size fits all," which is why I strongly advocate as much self-testing as possible, and hedging bets. When you find out about what tracking/storage service to use, let me know too. I'm using MS HealthVault for now, primarily because LabCorp will automatically post blood tests (whether doctor ordered, or DTC) into it. Cheers, James -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Aug 27 13:40:55 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 06:40:55 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> <013901d0e01b$87c15e80$97441b80$@att.net> Message-ID: <067901d0e0ce$02678d50$0736a7f0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2015 10:47 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 9:23 AM, spike wrote: >>?But I just can?t quite grasp the notion we are those people, the first ones to cross the Strait into advanced technology, and if we are, think of where that puts those of us special privileged life forms who are technology groksters. >?So what will you do with your advantage? There is no inherent duty, no required activity imposed by the universe. There simply is what you are. Congratulations, you rolled well so far; now what? Sheesh, I don?t know. All MBrain calculations all the time? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Thu Aug 27 14:45:22 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 07:45:22 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: <067901d0e0ce$02678d50$0736a7f0$@att.net> References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> <013901d0e01b$87c15e80$97441b80$@att.net> <067901d0e0ce$02678d50$0736a7f0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Aug 27, 2015 6:42 AM, "spike" wrote: > From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes > Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2015 10:47 PM > To: ExI chat list > > Subject: Re: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are > > On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 9:23 AM, spike wrote: > > >>?But I just can?t quite grasp the notion we are those people, the first ones to cross the Strait into advanced technology, and if we are, think of where that puts those of us special privileged life forms who are technology groksters. > > > > >?So what will you do with your advantage? There is no inherent duty, no required activity imposed by the universe. There simply is what you are. Congratulations, you rolled well so far; now what? > > Sheesh, I don?t know. All MBrain calculations all the time? You're not a MBrain yet. What will you do with the advantage you have right now, today? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Thu Aug 27 14:51:00 2015 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 10:51:00 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: <05a901d0e07f$0aad43a0$2007cae0$@att.net> References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> <013901d0e01b$87c15e80$97441b80$@att.net> <017201d0e024$0bd4e310$237ea930$@att.net> <05a901d0e07f$0aad43a0$2007cae0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 12:15 AM, spike wrote: > But to the contrary, I am filled with cognitive dissonance, now more than > ever. My cog-dis isn?t going away, it is getting worse over time. I know > that my current understanding of the universe, of evolution, of reality > utterly fails to explain why there aren?t signals out there from other > advanced civilizations. My understanding fails to explain why the double > slit experiment works the way it does. If fails to explain why space and > time are quantized. Of all these, the failure to find cosmic signals > bothers me the most: the others should be out there, and they should be > detectable. Otherwise I and we are still missing something fundamental. I hope you (all) can translate this jumble of words and words about math into a mental picture at least similar enough to what I am trying to share... Imagine LineLand inhabitants in the x-axis universe of y=0. Of course they don't understand the y dimension, that's just for our reference. Let's plot y=sin(x) Where our plot touches their universe they see a perfectly regular distance between discrete and otherwise unremarkable points. How would we even explain the sin() function to them? Interestingly, the inhabitants of a parallel dimension y=1 (and y=-1) would have a very similar understanding of our sin() function and the regular intervals at which it appears in their universe. An infinite number of parallel dimensions [y<-1 and y>1] would have no appearance of our sin() plot in their universe, so to them we do not exist. To those Real (but non-zero) universes [-1 < y < 1] the expression of our sin() function yields regular pairs of intersections with their universe. The unique nature of understanding their universe's intersection with our sin() function is a signature of cosmological constants for their universe. Also noteworthy is the relationship between the sign of the y-axis identities: they share an understanding of the exact distances (frequency) between intersections, though the starting point (relative to some x=0 reference) would be shifted. Lets assume they are advanced enough to somehow detect and understand the x=0 reference point. Ok, I assume everyone has read Flatland. :) There is a higher-dimensional equivalence around the planar concerns for inhabitants of z=0 and their neighboring parallel planes with respect to 3d surface functions. So where are we blind to higher-dimensional equivalence due to our ignorance of dimensions outside [x,y,z,t] ? I know... don't invent dimension just to pose a hypothetical. I appreciate that. The universal laws for planar creatures inhabiting z=0 may discover internally consistent subsets of higher-universal laws due to the very special effects of their unique position at z=0 in higher-order equations. Is our spacetime in a similarly-special address of hyperspacetime? From spike66 at att.net Thu Aug 27 15:45:04 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 08:45:04 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> <013901d0e01b$87c15e80$97441b80$@att.net> <067901d0e0ce$02678d50$0736a7f0$@att.net> Message-ID: <06ed01d0e0df$5b58cee0$120a6ca0$@att.net> From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes Subject: Re: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are > >> >?So what will you do with your advantage? There is no inherent duty, no required activity imposed by the universe. There simply is what you are. Congratulations, you rolled well so far; now what? > >>? Sheesh, I don?t know. All MBrain calculations all the time? >?You're not a MBrain yet. What will you do with the advantage you have right now, today? Calculations on the design of MBrains I meant. I created two videos for Khan Academy introducing the notion of MBrains, but as far as I know they didn?t use them. That isn?t really what Khan Academy is about. But there might be a forum somewhere where ideas like this gather to play. I like the idea of ten minute videos which get right to the point. The first of those videos is just under 10 minutes but the second is a little over 11, and both sound rushed, and I had a cold when I made them so I am not satisfied with either. Even then, they are parts 1 and 2 of what was originally planned as a trilogy, so I haven?t even gotten to the part about how an MBrain can gradually pull a star, and the challenges of heat control. Is there a web place where wacky scientific ideas gather in video format? spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Aug 27 15:53:10 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 08:53:10 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> <013901d0e01b$87c15e80$97441b80$@att.net> <017201d0e024$0bd4e310$237ea930$@att.net> <05a901d0e07f$0aad43a0$2007cae0$@att.net> Message-ID: <06fe01d0e0e0$7c388780$74a99680$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2015 7:51 AM To: ExI chat list Subject: [Bulk] Re: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 12:15 AM, spike wrote: >>..., I am filled with cognitive dissonance...the others should be out there, and they should be detectable. Otherwise I and we are still missing something fundamental. >...I know... don't invent dimension just to pose a hypothetical... On the contrary, do invent dimensions, if the notion explains some observed phenomenon. >... Ok, I assume everyone has read Flatland. :) ... Is our spacetime in a similarly-special address of hyperspacetime? _______________________________________________ Might be. Note that the 2D guy in Flatland (terrific book is this) posed the possibility to his 3D visitor that there is a fourth dimension but the sphere couldn't comprehend it because he was too 3D. The 2D guy was already having to open his mind to the possibility of a third dimension, so a fourth wasn't such a stretch. The whole notion boggled the mind of the sphere. {8^D Edwin Abbott was brilliant. spike From natasha at natasha.cc Thu Aug 27 17:41:18 2015 From: natasha at natasha.cc (natasha at natasha.cc) Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 10:41:18 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Book layout template & print / ebook venue Message-ID: <001401d0e0ef$94f11ee0$bed35ca0$@natasha.cc> Hello all - I have a questions to ask you all: I am ready to layout my new book and I need to find a source that has a template for layout that I can use and manipulate to fit my design needs, and an online venue that will both print the book and make it an ebook, and sell it on Amazon. I have no idea how to do this, or what online company to use that is affordable. Can you offer any suggestions? Thanks! Natasha -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tara at taramayastales.com Thu Aug 27 18:13:28 2015 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 11:13:28 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Book layout template & print / ebook venue In-Reply-To: <001401d0e0ef$94f11ee0$bed35ca0$@natasha.cc> References: <001401d0e0ef$94f11ee0$bed35ca0$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: It?s fine to hire someone to format your book, but don?t go through an intermediary to SELL your book. They could steal your rights, at worst, and just milk you of a lot of the profits you?d otherwise make, at best. It?s easy to upload your book to KDP and other online sites. In fact, for an ebook, I wouldn?t even suggest hiring someone to format it, but print is much trickier. It?s worth it to hire a designer for that. http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/04/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-in-book-interiors/ Tara Maya Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads > On Aug 27, 2015, at 10:41 AM, natasha at natasha.cc wrote: > > Hello all - I have a questions to ask you all: > > I am ready to layout my new book and I need to find a source that has a template for layout that I can use and manipulate to fit my design needs, and an online venue that will both print the book and make it an ebook, and sell it on Amazon. > > I have no idea how to do this, or what online company to use that is affordable. Can you offer any suggestions? > > Thanks! > > Natasha > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From danust2012 at gmail.com Thu Aug 27 18:21:53 2015 From: danust2012 at gmail.com (Dan) Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 11:21:53 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Book layout template & print / ebook venue In-Reply-To: <001401d0e0ef$94f11ee0$bed35ca0$@natasha.cc> References: <001401d0e0ef$94f11ee0$bed35ca0$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: > On Aug 27, 2015, at 10:41 AM, wrote: > > Hello all - I have a questions to ask you all: > > I am ready to layout my new book and I need to find a source that has a template for layout that I can use and manipulate to fit my design needs, and an online venue that will both print the book and make it an ebook, and sell it on Amazon. > > I have no idea how to do this, or what online company to use that is affordable. Can you offer any suggestions? > > Thanks! My friend Matt told me: "I generally recommendCreatespace.com for this kinda thing. It will give you a layout to work with and has tools to preview books before printing. Lulu.com also works." "Hope that helps." Regards, Dan Sample my Kindle books via: http://www.amazon.com/Dan-Ust/e/B00J6HPX8M/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Aug 27 18:18:53 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 11:18:53 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Book layout template & print / ebook venue In-Reply-To: <001401d0e0ef$94f11ee0$bed35ca0$@natasha.cc> References: <001401d0e0ef$94f11ee0$bed35ca0$@natasha.cc> Message-ID: <07f601d0e0f4$d876a2c0$8963e840$@att.net> >. On Behalf Of natasha at natasha.cc Subject: [ExI] Book layout template & print / ebook venue . >.I am ready to layout my new book. >.I have no idea how to do this, or what online company to use that is affordable. Can you offer any suggestions? .Natasha Damien knows: (thespike at satx.rr.com) spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From sjv2006 at gmail.com Thu Aug 27 19:06:07 2015 From: sjv2006 at gmail.com (Stephen Van Sickle) Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 12:06:07 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Tri Alpha Energy In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: *because it produces no neutrons and no radioactive isotopes* Very reduced neutrons, but there are still small side reactions that produce neutrons. About .2% of the total energy is fast neutrons. .2% of 100 megawatts is still 200 kw of neutrons, enough to be a hazard and to produce radioactive waste by neutron activation. Much less, but not zero. But any proton-boron reactor can easily burn deuterium, yielding a large fraction in fast neutrons. And cheap neutrons are a proliferation hazard...even a small fusion reactor can breed lots of plutonium, and make lots of bombs. On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 10:43 AM, John Clark wrote: > Tri Alpha Energy is about the most secretive publicity shy company around, > they have 150 employees 140 million in the bank and no website; they've > been around since 1998 but until recently all they've said it that they're > trying to develop fusion power using the Hydrogen-Boron reaction which is > one of the cleanest nuclear reaction known because it produces no neutrons > and no radioactive isotopes. Also the reaction produces fast electrically > charged particles so it can produce electricity directly, bypassing the > need for steam turbines and generators. Boron and Hydrogen are very common > elements too. > > Recently the company has opened up a bit and published papers showing that > they have made real progress, they've confined plasma in field-reversed > configuration (a sort of plasma smoke ring) at 10 million degrees Celsius > and held it steady for 5 milliseconds, which is over 10 times longer > than anybody has before. But there is still a long way to go. > > > http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2015/08/secretive-fusion-company-makes-reactor-breakthrough > > > > http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2015/06/mystery-company-blazes-trail-fusion-energy > > John K Clark > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Thu Aug 27 19:25:31 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 12:25:31 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Tri Alpha Energy In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <086901d0e0fe$26df7c80$749e7580$@att.net> From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Stephen Van Sickle On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 10:43 AM, John Clark wrote: Tri Alpha Energy ? they're trying to develop fusion power using the Hydrogen-Boron reaction which is one of the cleanest nuclear reaction known ?But there is still a long way to go. http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2015/08/secretive-fusion-company-makes-reactor-breakthrough http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2015/06/mystery-company-blazes-trail-fusion-energy John K Clark _______________________________________________ John, if the British work out either this or Skylon, if they can make either of these technologies do what they say it will do, I will hoist the union jack in front of my house, devour a lime pie with tea and crumpets, and personally write a heartfelt letter to Her Majesty apologizing for that bit of unpleasantness in the Boston Harbor in 1773. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From atymes at gmail.com Thu Aug 27 19:51:35 2015 From: atymes at gmail.com (Adrian Tymes) Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 12:51:35 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: <06ed01d0e0df$5b58cee0$120a6ca0$@att.net> References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> <013901d0e01b$87c15e80$97441b80$@att.net> <067901d0e0ce$02678d50$0736a7f0$@att.net> <06ed01d0e0df$5b58cee0$120a6ca0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Aug 27, 2015 8:59 AM, "spike" wrote: > From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes > Subject: Re: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are > >> >?So what will you do with your advantage? There is no inherent duty, no required activity imposed by the universe. There simply is what you are. Congratulations, you rolled well so far; now what? > > > >>? Sheesh, I don?t know. All MBrain calculations all the time? > > >?You're not a MBrain yet. What will you do with the advantage you have right now, today? > > Calculations on the design of MBrains I meant. I created two videos for Khan Academy introducing the notion of MBrains, but as far as I know they didn?t use them. That isn?t really what Khan Academy is about. But there might be a forum somewhere where ideas like this gather to play. ... > Is there a web place where wacky scientific ideas gather in video format? Only if by "gather" you mean "repository where the videos are dumped in case anyone wants to refer to them". For that there is YouTube, among other services. Video does not lend itself to a good format for public discussion, which is what I presume you mean by "forum". The resources (hardware and knowledge) needed to create video at all, and especially to be good at it, are far greater than those needed for text. Videos are more for presentation: one-way, one-to-many bursts of communication. Videos about non-mainstream ideas must usually start with, why should the audience (the general public, in this case) care? Otherwise they will not care, and the videos will be a wasted effort, as nearly no one will watch them. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From johnkclark at gmail.com Thu Aug 27 20:02:02 2015 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 16:02:02 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Tri Alpha Energy In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 3:06 PM, Stephen Van Sickle wrote: ?> ? > Very reduced neutrons, but there are still small side reactions that > produce neutrons. About .2% of the total energy is fast neutrons. > ?Well OK, there would be 2 very rare side reactions, ? 11B + ? ? 14N + n ? and ? 11B + p ? 11C + n ? ; but that would produce about ? a thousand times less radioactive waste ? than the ? conventional D-T ?fusion ? reaction, ? and the D-T ?fusion ? reaction ? would produce about a thousand times less ? radioactive waste ? ?than today's fission reactors. ? ?> ? > But any proton-boron reactor can easily burn deuterium, yielding a large > fraction in fast neutrons. And cheap neutrons are a proliferation > hazard...even a small fusion reactor can breed lots of plutonium, and make > lots of bombs. > ?If ?you want to make Plutonium slow neutrons are far more desirable than the fast neutrons fusion reactions produce. Fission reactors produce lots of slow neutrons and that's why Uranium reactors (but not Thorium reactors) produce Plutonium whether you want to or not. ?It's far too late to worry about excess Plutonium, you only need about 5 kg to make a bomb and there is already ? 1,200 metric tons of ? Plutonium ? on the planet and every ounce of it was make by slow neutrons inside fission reactors.? John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Aug 28 00:33:35 2015 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 20:33:35 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: <06fe01d0e0e0$7c388780$74a99680$@att.net> References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> <013901d0e01b$87c15e80$97441b80$@att.net> <017201d0e024$0bd4e310$237ea930$@att.net> <05a901d0e07f$0aad43a0$2007cae0$@att.net> <06fe01d0e0e0$7c388780$74a99680$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 11:53 AM, spike wrote: >>...I know... don't invent dimension just to pose a hypothetical... > > On the contrary, do invent dimensions, if the notion explains some observed phenomenon. Is it still ok if it is to explain un-observed phenomenon ... or observed non-phenomenon. :) >>... Ok, I assume everyone has read Flatland. :) ... Is our spacetime in a similarly-special address of hyperspacetime? > > _______________________________________________ > > Might be. Note that the 2D guy in Flatland (terrific book is this) posed the possibility to his 3D visitor that there is a fourth dimension but the sphere couldn't comprehend it because he was too 3D. The 2D guy was already having to open his mind to the possibility of a third dimension, so a fourth wasn't such a stretch. The whole notion boggled the mind of the sphere. {8^D > > Edwin Abbott was brilliant. You probably could read the book in about as much time as watch: http://www.flatlandthemovie.com/ - however the movie does a good of preserving the intent while updating some of the obsolete social commentary. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Fri Aug 28 00:55:40 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 17:55:40 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> <013901d0e01b$87c15e80$97441b80$@att.net> <017201d0e024$0bd4e310$237ea930$@att.net> <05a901d0e07f$0aad43a0$2007cae0$@att.net> <06fe01d0e0e0$7c388780$74a99680$@att.net> Message-ID: <01f201d0e12c$446429d0$cd2c7d70$@att.net> From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty ? >>? On the contrary, do invent dimensions, if the notion explains some observed phenomenon. >?Is it still ok if it is to explain un-observed phenomenon ... or observed non-phenomenon. :) Hmmm, that is a bit close to improper procedure. A bit too religioney for my taste. {8^D However, in the particular case of Fermi?s Paradox, I am flat desperate. >>? Edwin Abbott was brilliant. >?You probably could read the book in about as much time as watch: http://www.flatlandthemovie.com/ - however the movie does a good of preserving the intent while updating some of the obsolete social commentary. The political incorrectness of the original is part of its charm. Even my bride has sufficient sense of humor to appreciate the flagrant (apparent) sexist and classist views of Abbott. It gives us a view of how far society has come, ja? There is another dimension as well ({8^D): Abbott was writing parody within parody, ridiculing the sexism and classism of his day and place. spike -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From tara at taramayastales.com Thu Aug 27 16:33:57 2015 From: tara at taramayastales.com (Tara Maya) Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 09:33:57 -0700 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: <06fe01d0e0e0$7c388780$74a99680$@att.net> References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> <013901d0e01b$87c15e80$97441b80$@att.net> <017201d0e024$0bd4e310$237ea930$@att.net> <05a901d0e07f$0aad43a0$2007cae0$@att.net> <06fe01d0e0e0$7c388780$74a99680$@att.net> Message-ID: I read Flatland for the first time in fourth grade. I was so enamored of the cool idea of multiple dimensions, that when we had an English assignment to ?describe an alien,? I made my alien from the forth dimension. It appeared as several seemingly distinct yet shifting 3D forms in our space, but they were all connected in a way the human couldn?t see in hyperspace. A pretty straight-forward application of the concepts in Flatland, but apparently my fourth grade teacher had never read this book, and couldn?t comprehend what I was talking about. He tried to flunk me on the assignment because I was supposed to only describe ?one? alien, not several. I kept trying to explain that in hyperspace, it was a single creature?. sigh. Later, of course, looking back on it, I realized that the teacher just wanted us to practice using descriptive adjectives and adverbs, not to actually hypothesize about alien lifeforms, never mind hyperspace. But how was I supposed to know that as a forth grader? I took the assignment at face value! Tara Maya Blog | Twitter | Facebook | Amazon | Goodreads > On Aug 27, 2015, at 8:53 AM, spike wrote: > > > > -----Original Message----- > From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Mike Dougherty > Sent: Thursday, August 27, 2015 7:51 AM > To: ExI chat list > Subject: [Bulk] Re: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are > > On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 12:15 AM, spike wrote: >>> ..., I am filled with cognitive dissonance...the others should be out there, and they should be detectable. Otherwise I and we are still missing something fundamental. > >> ...I know... don't invent dimension just to pose a hypothetical... > > On the contrary, do invent dimensions, if the notion explains some observed phenomenon. > >> ... Ok, I assume everyone has read Flatland. :) ... Is our spacetime in a similarly-special address of hyperspacetime? > > _______________________________________________ > > Might be. Note that the 2D guy in Flatland (terrific book is this) posed the possibility to his 3D visitor that there is a fourth dimension but the sphere couldn't comprehend it because he was too 3D. The 2D guy was already having to open his mind to the possibility of a third dimension, so a fourth wasn't such a stretch. The whole notion boggled the mind of the sphere. {8^D > > Edwin Abbott was brilliant. > > spike > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From jasonresch at gmail.com Wed Aug 26 19:16:58 2015 From: jasonresch at gmail.com (Jason Resch) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 14:16:58 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Old Nutrition Studies In-Reply-To: References: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 2:24 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > My only contention with what you say below is that according to the >> largest meta-study to date, it appears that saturated fats are harmless. >> > ----------------- > > I'd like to also recommend Deep Nutrition, by Shanahan and Shanahan. > Let's start cooking with lard, like most of our ancestors. Works for me. > And no vegetable oils at all (olive oil excepted), esp. not heated ones. > > Also, Google '70% fat diet'. Amazing. (Yeah, right, I'm just > learning.....) > > Here is a 3 part video series about one doctor's self experimentation with a high (roughly 80% fat) diet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIEDYbGJsmQ&list=PLDD2426932CE026E3 It's very interesting. Jason > Bill W > > > On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 11:58 AM, Dave Sill wrote: > >> On Sun, Aug 23, 2015 at 11:46 PM, Jason Resch >> wrote: >> >>> >>> I appreciate your e-mail. You are correct that too much nutritional >>> advice has been proffered based on weak correlational studies (or worse). I >>> have attached a presentation I put together showing how the "avoid fat to >>> reduce heart attack risk" really blew up in our collective faces and is >>> perhaps largely to blame for the current diabetes/obesity rates in the >>> United States. All are welcome to share this presentation with anyone. >>> Note: Many comments/citations are in the "notes" view which you may only >>> see if opened in PowerPoint. >>> >> >> Excellent presentation. Thanks! >> >> >>> My only contention with what you say below is that according to the >>> largest meta-study to date, it appears that saturated fats are harmless. >>> >> >> Agreed. >> >> -Dave >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jasonresch at gmail.com Wed Aug 26 19:20:13 2015 From: jasonresch at gmail.com (Jason Resch) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 14:20:13 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Old Nutrition Studies In-Reply-To: <55DDD799.8070806@infinitefaculty.org> References: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> <55DDD799.8070806@infinitefaculty.org> Message-ID: It was in one of the citations in my presentation, here are articles about it: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/behindtheheadlines /news/2014-03-18-saturated-fats-and-heart-disease-link-unproven/ http://well.blogs.nytimes.com /2014/03/17/study-questions-fat-and-heart-disease-link/ In summary: In 2014, researchers from University of Cambridge and Medical Research Council, University of Oxford, Imperial College London, University of Bristol, Erasmus University Medical Centre and Harvard School of Public Health analyzed the results across 72 studies involving 530,525 people, found no statistically significant relation between saturated fat intake and heart disease. (They actually found no link between any fat and heart disease, with the notable exception of transfats) Jason On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 10:13 AM, Brian Manning Delaney < listsb at infinitefaculty.org> wrote: > > El 2015-08-24 a las 05:46, Jason Resch escribi?: > >> My only contention with what you say below is that according to the >> largest meta-study to date, it appears that saturated fats are harmless. >> > > Which study is that? > > Thanks, > Brian > > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jasonresch at gmail.com Wed Aug 26 19:23:25 2015 From: jasonresch at gmail.com (Jason Resch) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 14:23:25 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Old Nutrition Studies In-Reply-To: References: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> Message-ID: On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 2:38 PM, William Flynn Wallace wrote: > > Coconut oil is good, too. > Coconut oil is fairly unique as far as fats go. It contains something called Medium Chain Triglycerides (the only other food source known to contain these is in human breast milk and in goat milk). What is interesting about this is that they can directly enter the blood stream to provide energy, unlike other fats which need to be digested in the small intestine first. Also, the liver breaks them down into ketone bodies, which is one of two fuels the brain can use, the other being glucose. Since the brains ability to metabolize glucose is often impaired in dementia and Alzheimers patients, some have found that adding coconut oil (or MCT oil) directly to the diet to have brought about significant improvement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=50&v=feyydeMFWy4 Jason > > -Dave > > Hmm - is a coconut a vegetable or a fruit. No matter, you are right > according to my sources. With you all's help (sorry, Southern USA guy > here) I am now totally at odds with The China Study and all its > recommendations. Bring on the meat and fat. bill w > > On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 2:32 PM, Dave Sill wrote: > >> On Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 3:24 PM, William Flynn Wallace < >> foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> >>> I'd like to also recommend Deep Nutrition, by Shanahan and Shanahan. >>> Let's start cooking with lard, like most of our ancestors. Works for me. >>> And no vegetable oils at all (olive oil excepted), esp. not heated ones. >>> >> >> Coconut oil is good, too. >> >> -Dave >> >> _______________________________________________ >> extropy-chat mailing list >> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org >> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jasonresch at gmail.com Wed Aug 26 19:33:54 2015 From: jasonresch at gmail.com (Jason Resch) Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2015 14:33:54 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Old Nutrition Studies In-Reply-To: References: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 12:14 PM, James Clement wrote: > On Sun, Aug 23, 2015 at 8:46 PM, Jason Resch wrote: > >> >> My only contention with what you say below is that according to the >> largest meta-study to date, it appears that saturated fats are harmless. >> >> >> > I'm a quantified selfer, and have spent the past few years extensively > reading nutrition studies (Calorie Restriction, Fasting, Ketogenic, > Vegetarian/Vegan, Paleolithic, etc.), as well as most of the popular health > books including Taubes, Sears, Cordain, Campbell, Wolf, Mosley, Perlmutter, > Sinatra, Volek & Phinney, Lustig, McDougal, and McDonald . From 2013 to > 2014 I read over 2,500 papers. One thing that I noticed is that every data > set has outliers and while many variables are statistically significant for > particular biomarkers, there are always huge numbers of outliers. > > In my own case, I've had my whole genome > sequenced since 2009 and > myself, sister, parents, and other relatives 23andMe'd since 2010, and we > all have a genetic propensity towards Type II Diabetes. For the past > several years I've been taking my blood sugar measurements many times a day > (fasting, and immediately before and after meals) with a goal of achieving > early morning fasting blood sugar readings of 70 - 85 mg/dL and post-meal > spikes of no more than 120 mg/dL. I've been repeatedly surprised how small > amounts of carbohydrates on one day can raise my blood sugar the next > morning and throw it off for as much as 24 hours (e.g., goodbye my nightly > microbrewed beer). I also take my cholesterol measurements once a week (as > soon as I wake up, fasted) using CardioChek > , > which can measure Total Cholesterol, HDL, and Triglycerides. My father (age > 81) has super low LDL and high HDL, is thin, but has had two bypass > operations in his life. My mother has had high LDL and low HDL all of her > life (Total Chol over 300) and has no heart problems at 82 years of age. > Saturated fats (in my case coconut oil and high saturated-fat nuts) cause a > very significant increase in LDL cholesterol (measured by subtracting HDL > from Total Choles). I've proven this over and over to myself, by varying > only the saturated fat I'm eating and seeing what happens. > > I personally think that LDL Particle Size > , > C-Reactive Protein, Homocysteine, Triglycerides, and blood sugar are far > bigger risk factors for coronary disease than total cholesterol. LDL > particle size may end up being the most important as having a LDL Type A > profile (large, fluffy particles) put one at much less risk for CVD than > does Type B profile (small, dense particles). Other than blood sugar (which > is part of the general CBC), however, none of these tests are generally > requested by doctors, even for people who have heart trouble, despite their > relevance to CVD risk. LEF and LabCorp both sell such tests DTC, however. > > The upshot is that I don't think a single rule, such as "saturated fats > are bad" or "eating low carbs is good" (or their reverse) can apply to > everyone, when for any genetic risk there are usually 1/3 to 2/3 of humans > who have different variants from those of the favorable-risk group. I think > that people who want to really control their health need to read as much as > they can about the latest health information (from scientists or those > summarizing scientific work) and then test themselves rigorously and > frequently. In this regard, I think Mark Cuban > > was completely correct. > > James, Well said. I think it is a travesty that doctors are so eager to prescribe cholesterol lowering drugs based on only a total cholesterol drug test, when a slightly more expensive test (one time cost) might show there is no risk given one's lipid profile. I have also reached the conclusion that total LDL is a mostly meaningless number and that number of particles is what one should pay attention to. Failing that, given a standard test that provides only HDL, Trigylcerides, and LDL, ignore LDL and consider only the HDL/Triglycerides ratio. It should be greater than 1/2. Statins have a large list of side effects, and it is terrible to think how many people might be on these when they don't need to be. This cardiologist outlines the problem well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wgpl0zOg2ZY Jason -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jasonresch at gmail.com Thu Aug 27 08:45:47 2015 From: jasonresch at gmail.com (Jason Resch) Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 03:45:47 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Old Nutrition Studies In-Reply-To: <55DE9E90.5020400@infinitefaculty.org> References: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> <55DDD799.8070806@infinitefaculty.org> <55DE9E90.5020400@infinitefaculty.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 12:22 AM, Brian Manning Delaney < listsb at infinitefaculty.org> wrote: > El 2015-08-26 a las 17:50, William Flynn Wallace escribi?: > > ?I'll answer that: P.W. Piri-Tarino, etc. "Meta analysis of >> Prospective Cohort studies? >> ?Evaluating the Association of Saturated Fat with Cardiovascular >> Disease." American Journal of clinical Nutrition 91, no.3 March 2010 >> 535-46 340,000 Ss, 21 studies >> > > Take a look at the Medline entry for that study, and look at the comments, > as well as -- if you have time; there are 21 -- the reviews among the 70 > citing papers: > > http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20071648 > > I wouldn't base my dietary choices on the conclusions reached. The U.S. government's recommendations for the American people to change their diets and avoid saturated fat and dietary cholesterol was based on essentially no evidence at all: one scientist's hypothesis, never confirmed or tested, but nonetheless, used as the basis for nutritional advice for the past 40 years. > I'm not saying dietary SFA is evil; rather: we don't know. If I had to > guess I'd say one would be better off with complex carbs and lots of MUFA > and some PUFA. Based on what evidence? > (It's also likely that SFA is a problem only above a certain chain > length.) Why do you think so? Jason Can't wait until we have richer computer models of human physiology and can > do virtual trials! > > > James, how amazingly fortunate you are to have gotten a whole genome scan! > And thank you for participating in the PGP. Your participation benefits us > all. (I'm still trying to decide which health data tracking/storage system > is best so that I can upload my health data.) > > I'm also testing blood glucose regularly. I'm less convinced we know how > to interpret blood lipids, so I'm holding off on doing that frequently, but > th science is pretty solid on the merits of keeping glucose down -- both > avg. levels and spikes, possibly even very brief spikes (although CR > rodents in the normal model of CR, where, for budgetary reasons, the > animals are fed once a day, have huge, though fairly brief glucose spikes, > but still live extremely long lives). > > Brian > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jasonresch at gmail.com Thu Aug 27 08:50:56 2015 From: jasonresch at gmail.com (Jason Resch) Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2015 03:50:56 -0500 Subject: [ExI] Old Nutrition Studies In-Reply-To: <55DE9E90.5020400@infinitefaculty.org> References: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> <55DDD799.8070806@infinitefaculty.org> <55DE9E90.5020400@infinitefaculty.org> Message-ID: On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 12:22 AM, Brian Manning Delaney < listsb at infinitefaculty.org> wrote: > El 2015-08-26 a las 17:50, William Flynn Wallace escribi?: > > ?I'll answer that: P.W. Piri-Tarino, etc. "Meta analysis of >> Prospective Cohort studies? >> ?Evaluating the Association of Saturated Fat with Cardiovascular >> Disease." American Journal of clinical Nutrition 91, no.3 March 2010 >> 535-46 340,000 Ss, 21 studies >> > > Take a look at the Medline entry for that study, and look at the comments, > as well as -- if you have time; there are 21 -- the reviews among the 70 > citing papers: > > http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20071648 > > I wouldn't base my dietary choices on the conclusions reached. The U.S. government's recommendations for the American people to change their diets and avoid saturated fat and dietary cholesterol was based on essentially no evidence at all: one scientist's contentious hypothesis, never confirmed or test, but nonetheless, used as the basis for nutritional advice for the past 40 years. > I'm not saying dietary SFA is evil; rather: we don't know. If I had to > guess I'd say one would be better off with complex carbs and lots of MUFA > and some PUFA. Based on what evidence? > (It's also likely that SFA is a problem only above a certain chain > length.) Why do you think so? Jason Can't wait until we have richer computer models of human physiology and can > do virtual trials! > > > James, how amazingly fortunate you are to have gotten a whole genome scan! > And thank you for participating in the PGP. Your participation benefits us > all. (I'm still trying to decide which health data tracking/storage system > is best so that I can upload my health data.) > > I'm also testing blood glucose regularly. I'm less convinced we know how > to interpret blood lipids, so I'm holding off on doing that frequently, but > th science is pretty solid on the merits of keeping glucose down -- both > avg. levels and spikes, possibly even very brief spikes (although CR > rodents in the normal model of CR, where, for budgetary reasons, the > animals are fed once a day, have huge, though fairly brief glucose spikes, > but still live extremely long lives). > > Brian > > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From listsb at infinitefaculty.org Fri Aug 28 14:04:36 2015 From: listsb at infinitefaculty.org (Brian Manning Delaney) Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2015 16:04:36 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Old Nutrition Studies In-Reply-To: References: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> <55DDD799.8070806@infinitefaculty.org> <55DE9E90.5020400@infinitefaculty.org> Message-ID: <55E06A74.6040607@infinitefaculty.org> El 2015-08-27 a las 10:50, Jason Resch escribi?: > On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 12:22 AM, Brian Manning Delaney > > wrote: > I'm not saying dietary SFA is evil; rather: we don't know. If I had > to guess I'd say one would be better off with complex carbs and lots > of MUFA and some PUFA. > > Based on what evidence? Well, the "we don't know" part is based, of course, on a LACK of evidence. If you're wondering about my guess, that's based on epidemiological studies (those of long-lived peoples, and those conduct on people around the Mediterranean -- very weak evidence in both cases, thus "guess"). > (It's also likely that SFA is a problem only above a certain chain > length.) > > Why do you think so? Take a look at some of the work here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=dietary+saturated+fat+chain+length+cholesterol (use "Review" and "Human" filters). Although BELOW a certain chain length there could also be probs! -- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23616516 (Telemore length per se might not be as important as people think, though.) Brian From listsb at infinitefaculty.org Fri Aug 28 14:11:42 2015 From: listsb at infinitefaculty.org (Brian Manning Delaney) Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2015 16:11:42 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Online health trackers/storage [Was: Old Nutrition Studies] In-Reply-To: References: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> <55DDD799.8070806@infinitefaculty.org> <55DE9E90.5020400@infinitefaculty.org> Message-ID: <55E06C1E.8000100@infinitefaculty.org> El 2015-08-27 a las 07:50, James Clement escribi?: > When you find out about what tracking/storage service to use, let me > know too. I'm using MS HealthVault for now, primarily because LabCorp > will automatically post blood tests (whether doctor ordered, or DTC) > into it. I will definitely let you know! What I want might not exist. I want something that stores everything I can and might want to track, and, moreover, looks for correlations. And I want it to offer customizable degrees of sharing. Also important, though a tougher programming challenge, is the ability to accept input automatically from a wide variety of data sources -- Fitbit, CRON-O-Meter, etc. -- so that manual data entry is minimized. I'm not a programmer, but it seems like a not so tough programming challenge (aside from permitting uploads from other systems, which I imagine might be tricky, in part because of in some cases proprietary data formats). Anyone know whether something like this exists? Brian From msd001 at gmail.com Fri Aug 28 15:22:28 2015 From: msd001 at gmail.com (Mike Dougherty) Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2015 11:22:28 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> <013901d0e01b$87c15e80$97441b80$@att.net> <017201d0e024$0bd4e310$237ea930$@att.net> <05a901d0e07f$0aad43a0$2007cae0$@att.net> <06fe01d0e0e0$7c388780$74a99680$@att.net> Message-ID: On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 12:33 PM, Tara Maya wrote: > I read Flatland for the first time in fourth grade. I was so enamored of the cool idea of multiple dimensions, that when we had an English assignment to ?describe an alien,? I made my alien from the forth dimension. It appeared as several seemingly distinct yet shifting 3D forms in our space, but they were all connected in a way the human couldn?t see in hyperspace. A pretty straight-forward application of the concepts in Flatland, but apparently my fourth grade teacher had never read this book, and couldn?t comprehend what I was talking about. He tried to flunk me on the assignment because I was supposed to only describe ?one? alien, not several. I kept trying to explain that in hyperspace, it was a single creature?. sigh. > > Later, of course, looking back on it, I realized that the teacher just wanted us to practice using descriptive adjectives and adverbs, not to actually hypothesize about alien lifeforms, never mind hyperspace. But how was I supposed to know that as a forth grader? I took the assignment at face value! that's fantastic. I would suggest that a teacher should be more careful bounding the solution space when they ask children to use those powerful imaginations to complete assignments. :) If a 4th grader conceives of hyperspace as a first-effort at "alien" then we should expect something truly bizarre could well be beyond recognition. maybe? From jasonresch at gmail.com Fri Aug 28 16:38:39 2015 From: jasonresch at gmail.com (Jason Resch) Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2015 12:38:39 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Old Nutrition Studies In-Reply-To: <55E06A74.6040607@infinitefaculty.org> References: <000901d0ddba$90454a20$b0cfde60$@harveynewstrom.com> <55DDD799.8070806@infinitefaculty.org> <55DE9E90.5020400@infinitefaculty.org> <55E06A74.6040607@infinitefaculty.org> Message-ID: On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 10:04 AM, Brian Manning Delaney < listsb at infinitefaculty.org> wrote: > > El 2015-08-27 a las 10:50, Jason Resch escribi?: > >> On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 12:22 AM, Brian Manning Delaney >> > wrote: >> > > I'm not saying dietary SFA is evil; rather: we don't know. If I had >> to guess I'd say one would be better off with complex carbs and lots >> of MUFA and some PUFA. >> >> Based on what evidence? >> > > Well, the "we don't know" part is based, of course, on a LACK of evidence. > If you're wondering about my guess, that's based on epidemiological studies > (those of long-lived peoples, and those conduct on people around the > Mediterranean -- very weak evidence in both cases, thus "guess"). That study was terribly flawed. Their survey about what corsican's ate was taken during lent when they weren't eating meat. They also ignored the fact that Corsicans ate extremely low levels of grains in their diet. There were also very large biases between countries in the diagnosis of cause of death. This study took place between the 1950s and 1960s. Many hospitals at that time lacked the ability to diagnose heart disease as the cause of death. Correlational studies are never evidence, at best they can only be used as a justification for funds for to run a controlled experiment. Here is my theory: Ancel Keys's study looked at correlation between consumption of animal protein (as an aggregate in the country) and heart disease deaths. However consumption of animal protein is most correlated with wealth/levels of industrialization of the country. Had Key's choose to look at the correlation between ownership rates of cars, and heart disease, he would have seen a strong correlation. That would not have meant, however, that owning cars causes heart disease. Since wealth of a country is correlated with so many other things: consumption of fast food, stress, sedentary lifestyles, sugar consumption, meat consumption, smoking, etc., what is to blame? There's a hundred different possible causes, and no epidemiological study can pick out which. This page elaborates on the issues with Ancel Key's study: http://rawfoodsos.com/2011/12/22/the-truth-about-ancel-keys-weve-all-got-it-wrong/ > > > (It's also likely that SFA is a problem only above a certain chain >> length.) >> >> Why do you think so? >> > > Take a look at some of the work here: > > > http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=dietary+saturated+fat+chain+length+cholesterol > > (use "Review" and "Human" filters). > I see 14 articles using the review filter and those search terms. But none stood out as indicating long chain saturated fats were harmful. What was the particular study? > > Although BELOW a certain chain length there could also be probs! -- > > http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23616516 > > (Telemore length per se might not be as important as people think, though.) > > Interesting. The other confounding factor is that any calorie taken from some source, means some other calorie not taken from another source. Since protein calories, on a percentage basis, represent a small fraction of total calories in the diet, it means that typically an extra calorie from a fat source means one less calorie from a carbohydrate source and vice-versa. Jason -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jasonresch at gmail.com Fri Aug 28 16:41:25 2015 From: jasonresch at gmail.com (Jason Resch) Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2015 12:41:25 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: This short shorty makes the case quite convincing: http://frombob.to/you/index.html Jason On Thu, Aug 20, 2015 at 12:19 PM, BillK wrote: > We Can?t Find Any Alien Neighbors and Virtual Reality Might Be to Blame > By Aaron Frank Aug 20, 2015 > > < > http://singularityhub.com/2015/08/20/we-cant-find-any-alien-neighbors-and-virtual-reality-might-be-to-blame/ > > > > Quotes: > To address the Fermi Paradox, futurist John Smart proposes the > fascinating ?transcension hypothesis? theorizing that evolutionary > processes in our universe might lead all advanced civilizations > towards the same ultimate destination; one in which we transcend out > of our current space-time dimension into virtual worlds of our own > design. > > Soon, we won?t visit the Internet from the glass window of our > computer screens, but rather walk around inside it as a physical > place. Philip Rosedale, the creator of Second Life, recently announced > plans for a bold new virtual universe with a potential physical game > map as large as the landmass of Earth. Essentially, he?ll create a > virtual world with its own laws of physics, and once he?s pressed > play, a newly formed universe will have its own ?let there be light? > creation moment. > > As we continue our plunge into virtual spaces, the validity of the > transcension hypothesis will come into sharper focus. If technology > trends toward a world of microscopic computers with infinitely complex > realities inside, this might explain why we can?t see any alien > neighbors. They?ve left us behind for the digital wormholes of their > own design. > --------------- > > > Sounds plausible to me. > > BillK > > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Fri Aug 28 19:55:09 2015 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2015 12:55:09 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are Message-ID: On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 5:00 AM, "spike" wrote: snip Spike, there is a decent chance that the Fermi question will be answered within your lifetime. Either we find evidence of aliens, or whatever happens to them happens to us. Keith From spike66 at att.net Fri Aug 28 20:24:30 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2015 13:24:30 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <05d301d0e1cf$8f63d9f0$ae2b8dd0$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Keith Henson Sent: Friday, August 28, 2015 12:55 PM To: ExI chat list Subject: Re: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 5:00 AM, "spike" wrote: snip >...Spike, there is a decent chance that the Fermi question will be answered within your lifetime. >...Either we find evidence of aliens, or whatever happens to them happens to us...Keith _______________________________________________ Ja Keith I fear you are right on. There has been a lot of recent talk about how neurosis and creativity are linked. I offered a similar idea to that being promoted today, but called it the featherbed model: comfortable people don't create much, uncomfortable ones do. Neurosis is uncomfortable, so neurotics create. They are always thinking, wondering what to do to get more comfortable, like the homeless person sleeping on the park bench is uncomfortable; she squirms a lot. The silence of the cosmos is making me damn uncomfortable, and I am thinking a lot on how to solve this psychological park bench I am on. I know that my current understanding of the universe doesn't explain it; I know that even singularity theory doesn't explain it (it helps (but post-singularity societies should want to expand (and I see no evidence they have (ja?)))) I am using some of my most creating thinking these days to try to resolve this, but I am no closer to getting comfortable than the homeless person on that hard old park bench. It could be something simple, such as advanced societies consistently fail to make the transition to renewable energy, so they all end up fighting over dwindling concentrated energy sources. Or the really smart minority persistently get out-bred, so the population's collective intelligence and drive gradually dissipates like a mist in the cloudless spring dawn. I don't know Keith. I worry. spike From pharos at gmail.com Fri Aug 28 21:10:23 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2015 22:10:23 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: <05d301d0e1cf$8f63d9f0$ae2b8dd0$@att.net> References: <05d301d0e1cf$8f63d9f0$ae2b8dd0$@att.net> Message-ID: On 28 August 2015 at 21:24, spike wrote: > There has been a lot of recent talk about how neurosis and creativity are > linked. I offered a similar idea to that being promoted today, but called > it the featherbed model: comfortable people don't create much, uncomfortable > ones do. Neurosis is uncomfortable, so neurotics create. They are always > thinking, wondering what to do to get more comfortable, like the homeless > person sleeping on the park bench is uncomfortable; she squirms a lot. > > The silence of the cosmos is making me damn uncomfortable, and I am thinking > a lot on how to solve this psychological park bench I am on. I know that my > current understanding of the universe doesn't explain it; I know that even > singularity theory doesn't explain it (it helps (but post-singularity > societies should want to expand (and I see no evidence they have (ja?)))) I > am using some of my most creating thinking these days to try to resolve > this, but I am no closer to getting comfortable than the homeless person on > that hard old park bench. > > It could be something simple, such as advanced societies consistently fail > to make the transition to renewable energy, so they all end up fighting over > dwindling concentrated energy sources. Or the really smart minority > persistently get out-bred, so the population's collective intelligence and > drive gradually dissipates like a mist in the cloudless spring dawn. > > I don't know Keith. I worry. > It is worth worrying about species collapsing before reaching the singularity. I suspect that many planets don't have enough resources, or the resources are misused or wasted. Indeed, we may well be one of those. The good news is that I don't think that post-singularity species expand and spam the galaxy with their progeny. (Otherwise they would be here already). Once nanotech and virtual worlds become available, then life becomes too 'comfortable', as you say. Uploaded eternal life, with benefits. What's not to like? :) So concentrate your worry on getting us through the singularity! BillK From foozler83 at gmail.com Fri Aug 28 22:56:56 2015 From: foozler83 at gmail.com (William Flynn Wallace) Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2015 17:56:56 -0500 Subject: [ExI] new nutrition thread Message-ID: Someone criticized correlations in an earlier mailing. Yes, they don't show cause and effect, or at least not directly. But they are not just the first step in determining cause. Cause is somewhere in there in significant correlations, and dozens of studies are not likely to have the same defects, so some might cancel out. But to do experiments with people and nutrition? Hah. A few things; it is nearly impossible to do true experiments with people, especially longitudinal ones, for a lot of reasons: great variability, so many variables, people dropping out, and much more. One of the most important reasons is that people will lie. Humans are so good at it, and highly like to do so in certain areas. Ask them about what they eat, when they eat etc. and you are likely to get a lot of false data. I doubt that one single person accurately logs everything he eats in years of the study. Many people just cannot remember all they ate during the day, esp. if they 'cheated'. Almost worse than trying to do studies (never mind experiments) of sexuality. Given these conditions, doing long term experiments is just impossible. So we have to live with correlations. As we all know there are no experiments in humans showing tobacco causing cancers, emphysema, or anything else. It is very likely that that statement is true of every carcinogen studied (all experiments were done with lab animals, right?). But the correlations are overwhelming. Good enough for me. As The China Study and many others have pointed out, there are severe problems of bias in food studies because of the montrous amount of money involved, and thus bias in studies. It reminds me of 30 years ago when I did some research on cannabis in connection with a course I was teaching. Every single study funded by the feds showed ill effects of smoking. Every single independent study found no significant effects. Night and day. The longest study, done in Jamaica over 20 something years, showed no differences at all even though the cannabis used there was much stronger than what we had here. The only difference, nonsignificant, was that the smokers were 5 pounds lighter. (Who would have predicted that?). So it's hard for me to trust government or industry funded studies. If we are going to do experiments with the closest animal to people re digestive tract, we would use pigs. True. If we could not base our knowledge of people on anything but experiments, there would be very little known about us, and that probably not very generalizable. You people in the physical sciences don't know just how good you've got it. bill w -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Aug 29 00:45:22 2015 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2015 17:45:22 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are Message-ID: On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 1:37 PM, "spike" wrote: snip > The silence of the cosmos is making me damn uncomfortable, and I am thinking > a lot on how to solve this psychological park bench I am on. I know that my > current understanding of the universe doesn't explain it; I know that even > singularity theory doesn't explain it (it helps (but post-singularity > societies should want to expand (and I see no evidence they have (ja?)))) This is perhaps a flawed assumption. If the universe around us suddenly expanded by a million fold, would we think interstellar travel is even possible? That is what happens if post singularity "humans" upload into a fast virtual reality. Is this a strong attractor for all technological societies? > I > am using some of my most creating thinking these days to try to resolve > this, but I am no closer to getting comfortable than the homeless person on > that hard old park bench. On even days I think the aliens (and us) vanish into virtual reality. On odd days I think we are the first in our light cone. One day a year I contemplate the grimmer possibilities and all the time work on ways to avoid them. > It could be something simple, such as advanced societies consistently fail > to make the transition to renewable energy, so they all end up fighting over > dwindling concentrated energy sources. Or the really smart minority > persistently get out-bred, so the population's collective intelligence and > drive gradually dissipates like a mist in the cloudless spring dawn. > > I don't know Keith. I worry. I used to worry about this, but not for a number of years. If Ray is close to right, the kids who will lead the way into the singularity have already been born. If not, another generation will see advanced genetic engineering and a crop of really smart kids. Or if we are really unlucky, things will come unglued before we get to either of those. My best guess is that thing have already come apart in some parts of the world and in such places they will get even worse. Keith > spike > From hrivera at alumni.virginia.edu Fri Aug 28 22:22:04 2015 From: hrivera at alumni.virginia.edu (Henry Rivera) Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2015 18:22:04 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: <05d301d0e1cf$8f63d9f0$ae2b8dd0$@att.net> Message-ID: I think it's a Prime Directive-type thing. Non-interference and stealth until a certain level of development is attained. Or there is some transcendence from this dimension/universe/reality to another at a certain level of evolution, which is the true "expansion" of advanced intelligence. I don't mean VR. -Henry > On Aug 28, 2015, at 5:10 PM, BillK wrote: > >> On 28 August 2015 at 21:24, spike wrote: >> There has been a lot of recent talk about how neurosis and creativity are >> linked. I offered a similar idea to that being promoted today, but called >> it the featherbed model: comfortable people don't create much, uncomfortable >> ones do. Neurosis is uncomfortable, so neurotics create. They are always >> thinking, wondering what to do to get more comfortable, like the homeless >> person sleeping on the park bench is uncomfortable; she squirms a lot. >> >> The silence of the cosmos is making me damn uncomfortable, and I am thinking >> a lot on how to solve this psychological park bench I am on. I know that my >> current understanding of the universe doesn't explain it; I know that even >> singularity theory doesn't explain it (it helps (but post-singularity >> societies should want to expand (and I see no evidence they have (ja?)))) I >> am using some of my most creating thinking these days to try to resolve >> this, but I am no closer to getting comfortable than the homeless person on >> that hard old park bench. >> >> It could be something simple, such as advanced societies consistently fail >> to make the transition to renewable energy, so they all end up fighting over >> dwindling concentrated energy sources. Or the really smart minority >> persistently get out-bred, so the population's collective intelligence and >> drive gradually dissipates like a mist in the cloudless spring dawn. >> >> I don't know Keith. I worry. > > > It is worth worrying about species collapsing before reaching the singularity. > I suspect that many planets don't have enough resources, or the > resources are misused or wasted. Indeed, we may well be one of those. > > The good news is that I don't think that post-singularity species > expand and spam the galaxy with their progeny. (Otherwise they would > be here already). Once nanotech and virtual worlds become available, > then life becomes too 'comfortable', as you say. > Uploaded eternal life, with benefits. What's not to like? :) > > So concentrate your worry on getting us through the singularity! > > BillK > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From spike66 at att.net Sat Aug 29 02:04:48 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2015 19:04:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <002101d0e1ff$1814f0c0$483ed240$@att.net> -----Original Message----- From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of Keith Henson ... > >... Or the really smart minority persistently get out-bred, so the population's collective intelligence and drive gradually dissipates like a mist in the cloudless spring dawn... spike >...I used to worry about this, but not for a number of years. If Ray is close to right, the kids who will lead the way into the singularity have already been born. If not, another generation will see advanced genetic engineering and a crop of really smart kids... Keith I am astonished at how good are the educational materials available free online. Any optimism I have now is based on how we have had a sudden explosion in the past ten years in stuff like Khan Academy and the other free resources. We are making progress. spike From spike66 at att.net Sat Aug 29 02:18:50 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2015 19:18:50 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: <05d301d0e1cf$8f63d9f0$ae2b8dd0$@att.net> Message-ID: <002201d0e201$0e79c390$2b6d4ab0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Henry Rivera Subject: Re: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are >...I think it's a Prime Directive-type thing. Non-interference and stealth until a certain level of development is attained... Sure but why would that apply to *all* of the newly capable civilizations? We sprayed signals in all directions as soon as we could do it, before we got any prime directives from anywhere. If such a directive exists, there should be rogues here and there. >...Or there is some transcendence from this dimension/universe/reality to another at a certain level of evolution, which is the true "expansion" of advanced intelligence. I don't mean VR. -Henry Sure again, but why would that notion apply to all civilizations everywhere and everywhen? We sent out signals before we singularitied out of view or nanoteched inward or jumped into the next higher dimension or nuked ourselves or VRed ourselves, before any of the theoretical good or bad scenarios happened. We were sending out signals before we even had personal computers. There should be other societies that get to about where we are now, then level out in a comfortable lazy middle age, sending signals both directed and unintentional, but not bothering to look for replies, perhaps without the technology to receive or decode. Once again I am compelled to at least ponder the mind-boggling possibility that we really are the first ones here. But there have been earth-like planets, there have been metals for eons. I am at a complete loss to explain why others didn't evolve billions of years ago, and if they did, where are the indications? How the hell could they *all* be missing? spike From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Aug 29 17:24:48 2015 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2015 10:24:48 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are Message-ID: On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 5:00 AM, "spike" wrote: > Sure but why would that apply to *all* of the newly capable civilizations? > We sprayed signals in all directions as soon as we could do it, before we > got any prime directives from anywhere. If such a directive exists, there > should be rogues here and there. Spike, it's a thin shell, hundred years thick more or less. It's going to fall to the noise level before it gets far. >>...Or there is some transcendence from this dimension/universe/reality to > another at a certain level of evolution, which is the true "expansion" of > advanced intelligence. I don't mean VR. -Henry > > Sure again, but why would that notion apply to all civilizations everywhere > and everywhen? We sent out signals before we singularitied out of view or > nanoteched inward or jumped into the next higher dimension or nuked > ourselves or VRed ourselves, before any of the theoretical good or bad > scenarios happened. We were sending out signals before we even had personal > computers. > > There should be other societies that get to about where we are now, then > level out in a comfortable lazy middle age, sending signals both directed > and unintentional, but not bothering to look for replies, perhaps without > the technology to receive or decode. > > Once again I am compelled to at least ponder the mind-boggling possibility > that we really are the first ones here. We can't see the whole thing, just the ones in our light cone. Still, there has been enough metals to make earth-like planets for close to ten billion years. That's a big light cone. > But there have been earth-like > planets, there have been metals for eons. I am at a complete loss to > explain why others didn't evolve billions of years ago, and if they did, > where are the indications? How the hell could they *all* be missing? Suitable places may be much less common than we think. And the universe may be much harder on lifeforms as well. In 774 or 775 the Earth seems to have been in the path of a gamma ray burst. It was too weak to have biological effect, but much closer, it would have been rough. *IF* a species was inclined to spread out to the stars, the obvious way to travel is light sails pushed by laser cannons themselves powered by stars. The spill around the light sails would be visible clear across the visible universe. We don't see such or at least have not yet. Being the first is perhaps the best situation. That makes our future unknown instead of vanishing for some reason. If technological lifeforms are common, then *something* gets all of them. Keith From johnkclark at gmail.com Sat Aug 29 17:39:58 2015 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2015 13:39:58 -0400 Subject: [ExI] [Bulk] Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: <012f01d0dcfc$8692c7a0$93b856e0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 BillK wrote: > > > Just because we can't detect them, doesn't mean they are not around. > Life may be very common in the universe but intelligent life is another matter. ?With apologies to the late great ? Carl Sagan ?, as far as advanced technology ET ?is concerned I think the absence of evidence IS evidence of absence. ?> ? > at a basic level you can use waste heat to generate electricity. ? No thermodynamic process can ever be 100% efficient and the temperature of empty space (2.7 degrees Kelvin) sets a strict limit. If advanced technology ET ? ? existed in Andromeda ? we shouldn't be able to detect that galaxy with gamma rays or X rays or ultraviolet or visible light ?or even infrared because it's only emissions would be massive amounts of microwaves. And that does not correspond with our observations. ? John K Clark > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From spike66 at att.net Sat Aug 29 17:43:34 2015 From: spike66 at att.net (spike) Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2015 10:43:34 -0700 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <010001d0e282$3dfdbf50$b9f93df0$@att.net> >... On Behalf Of Keith Henson ... >...Spike, it's a thin shell, hundred years thick more or less. It's going to fall to the noise level before it gets far. In 1974, SETI transmitted intentional interpretable signals at a frequency which makes this humble planet the brightest object in the galaxy at that frequency. If there is anyone out there watching, they know of us. If there is some kind of prime directive, it seems they would have told us by now. The 1974 signal was directional, but there have been occasional other widely-distributed signals. >...Being the first is perhaps the best situation. That makes our future unknown instead of vanishing for some reason. If technological lifeforms are common, then *something* gets all of them...Keith _______________________________________________ Ja, not only that, something gets all of them *quickly.* By that model, ours would need to be an uncharacteristically long-lived technologically enabled species. Does *every* other tech-species nuke itself as soon as it figures out how to make plutonium? All of them? Are we violent apes really the most peaceful species ever to reach nuclear fission? Keith you see why this subject makes me squirm. spike From hkeithhenson at gmail.com Sat Aug 29 18:16:51 2015 From: hkeithhenson at gmail.com (Keith Henson) Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2015 11:16:51 -0700 Subject: [ExI] More on the future. Message-ID: Lots of discussion over on slashdot. http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/08/27/2216217/research-suggests-how-alien-life-could-spread-across-the-galaxy Keith From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sat Aug 29 19:55:20 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2015 15:55:20 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: <05d301d0e1cf$8f63d9f0$ae2b8dd0$@att.net> References: <05d301d0e1cf$8f63d9f0$ae2b8dd0$@att.net> Message-ID: On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 4:24 PM, spike wrote: > It could be something simple, such as advanced societies consistently fail > to make the transition to renewable energy, so they all end up fighting > over > dwindling concentrated energy sources. Or the really smart minority > persistently get out-bred, so the population's collective intelligence and > drive gradually dissipates like a mist in the cloudless spring dawn. ### Nah, this won't happen to us :) Moderately dangerous stochastically destructive processes cannot be an explanation for a consistent lack of expansion shells. There are many quadrillions of potentially life-bearing planets in our past light-cone, so whatever prevented every single one of them from bearing fruit was not just random chance, it's a law of nature. Worries about renewable energy and dysgenia are those vague fears implanted in us by the chattering classes, not real dangers based on physical science... but can you point to a cut-and-dry engineering reason for consistent civilizational failure? It must be something that leaves no escape route at all, no chance of success. I do not know about any physical danger that even remotely approaches the level of intractable enmity to life that is needed to explain the Fermi paradox. This, perhaps paradoxically, leads me to optimism or at least being at ease. If known dangers do not explain the Fermi paradox, then the Fermi paradox does not make known dangers more dangerous. The answer to it is either (A) we are the first and probably will grow up to flourish or (B) whatever does us in is completely unknown to us and will kill us very soon without any hope of dealing with it, or (C) we are so pathetically wrong about everything we can't even start asking the right questions. Since A leads to optimism and you can't do anything about B or C anyway, the proper attitude is don't worry, be happy - and, or course, help build that first starship whenever you can spare some time or dime. Rafa? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com Sat Aug 29 20:04:45 2015 From: rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com (Rafal Smigrodzki) Date: Sat, 29 Aug 2015 16:04:45 -0400 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 1:24 PM, Keith Henson wrote: > > > *IF* a species was inclined to spread out to the stars, the obvious > way to travel is light sails pushed by laser cannons themselves > powered by stars. The spill around the light sails would be visible > clear across the visible universe. We don't see such or at least have > not yet. ### This image gives me the goosebumps: Sailing through the darkest night on pillars of burning light to claim the farthest shores in the name of life - what could be more poetic? Rafa? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From listsb at infinitefaculty.org Sun Aug 30 06:29:06 2015 From: listsb at infinitefaculty.org (Brian Manning Delaney) Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2015 08:29:06 +0200 Subject: [ExI] new nutrition thread In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <55E2A2B2.3080603@infinitefaculty.org> Bill, thanks for the thoughtful post. Agree about correlations. Yes, people in the physical sciences have it easy! (Well, in the way you note.) El 2015-08-28 a las 18:38, Jason Resch escribi?: > >> On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 10:04 AM, Brian Manning Delaney >> > wrote: >> Take a look at some of the work here: >> >> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=dietary+saturated+fat+chain+length+cholesterol >> >> (use "Review" and "Human" filters). > I see 14 articles using the review filter and those search terms. But none stood out as indicating long chain saturated fats were harmful. What was the particular study? Sorry, forgot I was using custom filters. There are several articles. One is: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22331686 I had an electronic copy but can't find it right now. Another worth reading: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4475777/ -- which focuses more on SFA. But each individual study is far too weak to draw conclusions from. My guess (again, it's a guess -- slightly educated, but still) is based on reading numerous articles, some observational in humans, some dealing with theories about mechanisms (intracellular ceramide generation, for ex.). I feel (much more than "think") safe with the conclusion that lowish- to medium-fat, if it can be done in a way that doesn't cause high blood glucose, is likely healthiest for most people, otherwise higher fat that's low in SFA, esp. longer-chain SFA. Brian From scerir at alice.it Sun Aug 30 08:19:57 2015 From: scerir at alice.it (scerir at alice.it) Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2015 10:19:57 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] Cramer on impossibility of FTL communication Message-ID: <14f7db10603.scerir@alice.it> An Inquiry into the Possibility of Nonlocal Quantum Communication Authors: John G. Cramer, Nick Herbert http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.5098 Abstract: The possibility of nonlocal quantum communication is considered. We investigate three gedankenexperiments that have variable entanglement: (1) a 4-detector polarization-entangled system, (2) a 4- detector path-entangled system, and (3) a 3-detector path-entangled system that uses an innovative optical mixer to combine photon paths. A new quantum paradox is reviewed in which the presence or absence of an interference pattern in a path-entangled two photon system, controlled by measurement choice, is a potential nonlocal signal. We show that for the cases considered, even when interference patterns can be switched off and on, there is always a "signal" interference pattern and an "anti-signal" interference pattern that mask any observable interference when they are added, even when entanglement and coherence are simultaneously present. This behavior can be attributed to what in the literature has been called "the complementarity of one-particle and two- particle interference". Important papers about "the complementarity of one- particle and two-particle interference" are: http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0112065 http://physics.gmu.edu/~rubinp/courses/123/superpositionprinciple.pdf That is to say it seems not possible to use quantum entanglement (i.e. two-photon position/momentum quantum entanglement) to create (or not) interference patterns on a screen (or whatever) at a distance. Of course we know there are theorems (i.e. by Ghirardi, etc.) showing we cannot use quantum entanglements for FTL communication. But we also know that theorems sometimes are circular. It is possible that formalisms used in this theorems (i.e. tensor product) already do not allow FTL communication (as pointed out by Kennedy) http://philpapers.org/rec/KENOTE From giulio at gmail.com Sun Aug 30 09:14:41 2015 From: giulio at gmail.com (Giulio Prisco) Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2015 11:14:41 +0200 Subject: [ExI] Cramer on impossibility of FTL communication In-Reply-To: <14f7db10603.scerir@alice.it> References: <14f7db10603.scerir@alice.it> Message-ID: Thanks for posting! By pure synchronicity, I was reading the paper when your post arrived! The consensus, even among imaginative mavericks like Cramer and Herbert, seems to be that quantum entanglement can't be used for instant messaging. That's kind of intuitive because measurements are random anyway, entanglement or not, and cheating breaks the entanglement. Of course one can hope to find a cleaver way of cheating... Any news about that? On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 10:19 AM, scerir at alice.it wrote: > An Inquiry into the Possibility of Nonlocal Quantum Communication > > Authors: > John G. Cramer, Nick Herbert > > http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.5098 > Abstract: > The possibility of nonlocal quantum > communication is considered. We investigate three gedankenexperiments > that have > variable entanglement: (1) a 4-detector polarization-entangled system, (2) a 4- > detector > path-entangled system, and (3) a 3-detector path-entangled system > that uses an innovative optical mixer > to combine photon paths. > A new quantum > paradox is reviewed in which the presence or absence of an interference pattern > in > a path-entangled two photon system, controlled by measurement choice, is a > potential nonlocal signal. > We show that for the cases considered, even when > interference patterns can be switched off and on, > there is always a "signal" > interference pattern and an "anti-signal" interference pattern that mask > any > observable interference when they are added, even when entanglement and > coherence are > simultaneously present. This behavior can be attributed to what > in the literature has been called > "the complementarity of one-particle and two- > particle interference". > > Important papers about "the complementarity of one- > particle and two-particle interference" are: > > http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0112065 > http://physics.gmu.edu/~rubinp/courses/123/superpositionprinciple.pdf > That is > to say it seems not possible to use quantum entanglement (i.e. two-photon > > position/momentum quantum entanglement) to create (or not) interference > patterns > on a screen (or whatever) at a distance. > > Of course we know there are > theorems (i.e. by Ghirardi, etc.) showing we cannot use > quantum entanglements > for FTL communication. But we also know that theorems > sometimes are circular. > It is possible that formalisms used in this theorems > (i.e. tensor product) > already do not allow FTL communication (as pointed out by > Kennedy) > > http://philpapers.org/rec/KENOTE > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat From scerir at alice.it Sun Aug 30 15:39:33 2015 From: scerir at alice.it (scerir at alice.it) Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2015 17:39:33 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] R: Re: Cramer on impossibility of FTL communication Message-ID: <14f7f437b6d.scerir@alice.it> Ciao Giulio, Well, there is a general agreement we cannot use quantum entanglement for FTL messaging. By definition we cannot use for FTL messaging the so called "superquantum" correlations . These correlations are still under investigation, under the name of Popescu-Rohrlich correlations, or PR-boxes. Good papers about "superquantum" correlations are http://tinyurl.com/nw6h9n3 http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9508009.pdf Quantum mechanics and relativistic causality together imply nonlocality. Can we invert the logical order? Can we consider a conjecture that nonlocality and relativistic causality together imply quantum mechanics? See also http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9709026v2.pdfand http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v10/n4/full/nphys2916.html But (following Jarrett, Shimony, Ghirardi, Howard, Eberhard, Cushing, etc.) it is possible to show that a ***deterministic*** theory (i.e. one in which the range of any probability distribution of outcomes is the set 0 or 1) reproducing all the predictions of (the indeterministic) quantum mechanics would allow FTL signaling. That's important imo. ----Messaggio originale---- Da: giulio at gmail.com Data: 30-ago-2015 11.14 A: "scerir at alice.it", "ExI chat list" Ogg: Re: [ExI] Cramer on impossibility of FTL communication Thanks for posting! By pure synchronicity, I was reading the paper when your post arrived! The consensus, even among imaginative mavericks like Cramer and Herbert, seems to be that quantum entanglement can't be used for instant messaging. That's kind of intuitive because measurements are random anyway, entanglement or not, and cheating breaks the entanglement. Of course one can hope to find a cleaver way of cheating... Any news about that? From johnkclark at gmail.com Sun Aug 30 17:41:41 2015 From: johnkclark at gmail.com (John Clark) Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2015 13:41:41 -0400 Subject: [ExI] A Upload Worm Message-ID: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_i1NKPzbjM John K Clark -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jasonresch at gmail.com Sun Aug 30 18:18:21 2015 From: jasonresch at gmail.com (Jason Resch) Date: Sun, 30 Aug 2015 14:18:21 -0400 Subject: [ExI] new nutrition thread In-Reply-To: <55E2A2B2.3080603@infinitefaculty.org> References: <55E2A2B2.3080603@infinitefaculty.org> Message-ID: On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 2:29 AM, Brian Manning Delaney < listsb at infinitefaculty.org> wrote: > > Bill, thanks for the thoughtful post. Agree about correlations. Yes, > people in the physical sciences have it easy! (Well, in the way you note.) > > El 2015-08-28 a las 18:38, Jason Resch escribi?: > > > >> On Fri, Aug 28, 2015 at 10:04 AM, Brian Manning Delaney >>> > wrote: >>> Take a look at some of the work here: >>> >>> >>> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=dietary+saturated+fat+chain+length+cholesterol >>> >>> (use "Review" and "Human" filters). >>> >> > I see 14 articles using the review filter and those search terms. But none >> stood out as indicating long chain saturated fats were harmful. What was >> the particular study? >> > > Sorry, forgot I was using custom filters. > > There are several articles. One is: > > http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22331686 > > This study confirms that eating saturated fat raises HDL and LDL levels, which is true. But what wasn't appreciated at the time of the diet-heart hypothesis is that there are many types of LDL, and that the kind of LDL particle that is raised by intake of saturated fat isn't one of the harmful ones. Thus, the total increase in cholesterol (raising the protective HDL, and raising the harmless type of LDL) should be considered as a net improvement in coronary health. > I had an electronic copy but can't find it right now. > > Another worth reading: > > http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4475777/ Interesting. Thanks for sharing. I am of the opinion that MCT's (medium chain length triglycerides) are among the healthiest calorie sources available to us, and also that PUFA are in-general less healthy than SFA. PUFA are longer chain lengths than most SFA, so there is perhaps something to longer chain fatty acids being progressively less healthy. Jason > > > -- which focuses more on SFA. > > But each individual study is far too weak to draw conclusions from. My > guess (again, it's a guess -- slightly educated, but still) is based on > reading numerous articles, some observational in humans, some dealing with > theories about mechanisms (intracellular ceramide generation, for ex.). > > I feel (much more than "think") safe with the conclusion that lowish- to > medium-fat, if it can be done in a way that doesn't cause high blood > glucose, is likely healthiest for most people, otherwise higher fat that's > low in SFA, esp. longer-chain SFA. > > Brian > _______________________________________________ > extropy-chat mailing list > extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org > http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From scerir at alice.it Mon Aug 31 08:32:09 2015 From: scerir at alice.it (scerir at alice.it) Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2015 10:32:09 +0200 (CEST) Subject: [ExI] R: Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are Message-ID: <14f82e28e8b.scerir@alice.it> John Cramer wrote: "This brings us to a variation of the famous Fermi Paradox: if interstellar wormhole transport is possible, shouldn't the technologically advanced civilizations of our galaxy already be sending tiny accelerated wormhole portals in our direction? Then, where are they? Perhaps they are already here. Cosmic ray physicists have occasionally observed strange super- energetic cosmic ray detection events, the Centauro events. These are cosmic ray particles with incredibly high energies that, when striking Earth's upper atmosphere, produce a large shower of particles that contains too many gamma rays and too few mu leptons, as compared to more normal cosmic ray shower events. The Centauro events presently lack an explanation based on any known physics. However, an accelerated wormhole mouth with a large electric charge should have a large gamma-ray to mu lepton production ratio in such collisions, since it would have large electromagnetic interactions but no strong or weak interactions with the matter with which it collided. It is interesting to contemplate the possibility that some advanced civilization may be mapping the galaxy with accelerated wormhole portals, sending little time-dilated observation points out into the cosmos as peep-holes for viewing the wonders of the universe. And perhaps, when a particularly promising or interesting scene comes into view, the peep hole is halted and expanded into a portal through which a Visitor can pass. Clearly we need to gain much more understanding of wormholes. They could provide our pathway to the stars." http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw162.html From bbenzai at yahoo.com Mon Aug 31 08:43:36 2015 From: bbenzai at yahoo.com (Ben) Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2015 09:43:36 +0100 Subject: [ExI] Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <55E413B8.4010802@yahoo.com> Spike wrote: "In 1974, SETI transmitted intentional interpretable signals at a frequency which makes this humble planet the brightest object in the galaxy at that frequency. If there is anyone out there watching, they know of us" But that wasn't even 100 years ago! Let's say it was 100 years ago, to make the numbers easy for my tiny brain. How big is the galaxy? About 100 000 ly across? So to even see the extent of our (extremely attenuated) signal now, you'd have to have a model of the galaxy about 1 metre across, and the signal area would be a fat dot near the edge. So this humble planet might be the brightest object at that frequency in a sphere less than 100ly across, but so what? Less than 15 000 stars will have seen that signal so far. Out of probably a few hundred billion. What's that, 0.000015%? We need to wait another 999 times 100 years before saying "If there is anyone out there watching (and they happened to be looking in the right direction at the right time), they know of us". Then another 100 000 years for a return signal to let us know that they know of us. OK, those are extremely simplified numbers, and we aren't on the very edge of the galaxy, but you get the idea. I think of the situation as a bit like a firefly in a continent-sized forest, emitting one brief flash of light, waiting a tiny fraction of a second, then concluding that there are no females in the whole forest. Ben Zaiboc From pharos at gmail.com Mon Aug 31 09:21:50 2015 From: pharos at gmail.com (BillK) Date: Mon, 31 Aug 2015 10:21:50 +0100 Subject: [ExI] R: Re: Virtual Reality is where the aliens are In-Reply-To: <14f82e28e8b.scerir@alice.it> References: <14f82e28e8b.scerir@alice.it> Message-ID: On 31 August 2015 at 09:32, scerir wrote: > John Cramer wrote: "This brings us to a variation of the famous Fermi Paradox: > if interstellar wormhole transport is possible, shouldn't the technologically > advanced civilizations of our galaxy already be sending tiny accelerated > wormhole portals in our direction? Then, where are they? Perhaps they are > already here. Cosmic ray physicists have occasionally observed strange super- > energetic cosmic ray detection events, the Centauro events. These are cosmic > ray particles with incredibly high energies that, when striking Earth's upper > atmosphere, produce a large shower of particles that contains too many gamma > rays and too few mu leptons, as compared to more normal cosmic ray shower > events. The Centauro events presently lack an explanation based on any known > physics. Wikipedia - he say no. Quote: Solution to the Centauro puzzle In 2003 an international team of researches from Russia and Japan found out that the mysterious observation from mountain-top cosmic ray experiments can be explained with conventional physics. The new analysis of Centauro I reveals that there is a difference in the arrival angle between the upper block and lower block events, so the two are not products of the same interaction. That leaves only the lower chamber data connected to the Centauro I event. In other words, the man-horse analogy becomes redundant. There is only an obvious "tail", and no "head". The original detector setup had gaps between neighboring blocks in the upper chamber. Linear dimensions of gaps were comparable to the geometrical size of the event. The signal observed in the lower detector was similar to an ordinary interaction occurred at low altitude above the chamber, thus providing a natural solution: passing of a cascade of particles through a gap between the upper blocks. In 2005 it was shown that "other Centauro events" can be explained by peculiarities of the Chacaltaya detector. So-called "exotic signal" observed so far in cosmic ray experiments using a traditional X-ray emulsion chamber detector can be consistently explained within the framework of standard physics. ----------------- There are also rather too many occurrences for them to be 'aliens taking a look at us'. (Unless we have become a popular soap-opera for aliens). BillK