"You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here." (VQGAN+CLIP seems somewhat obsessed with the mailbox.)
"You are behind the white house. A path leads into the forest to the east. In one corner of the house there is a small window which is slightly ajar."
"You are in the living room. There is a doorway to the east, a wooden door with strange gothic lettering to the west, which appears to be nailed shut, a trophy case, and a large oriental rug in the center of the room. Above the trophy case hangs an elvish sword of great anti..."
"This is an art gallery. Most of the paintings have been stolen by vandals with exceptional taste. The vandals left through either the north or west exits. Fortunately, there is still one chance for you to be a vandal, for on the far wall is a painting of unparalleled beauty."
"This is a small room with passages to the east and south and a forbidding hole leading west. Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the walls. A nasty-looking troll, brandishing a bloody axe, blocks all passages out of the room."
"You have entered the Land of the Living Dead. Thousands of lost souls can be heard weeping and moaning... Lying in one corner of the room is a beautifully carved crystal skull. It appears to be grinning at you rather nastily."
"You are standing on the top of the Flood Control Dam #3, which was quite a tourist attraction in times far distant... The sluice gates on the dam are closed. Behind the dam, there can be seen a wide reservoir. Water is pouring over the top of the now abandoned dam."
• • •
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This paper from @CSERCambridge is a great example of systems thinking in GCRs: looking for pinch points where global infrastructure concentrates near natural hazards. nature.com/articles/s4146…
Many things get drawn close to hazards: Teheran is on a fault line that provides good water, container ports on cheap flat land close to the sea vulnerable to storm surge and sea rise, people live in Florida because weather that also enables hurricanes.
Good geothermal and cooling are drawing data centers to Iceland. The Mediterranean and Bay Area complex geology make them attractive but geologically "exciting". en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsili
If the Hampshire et al. thelancet.com/journals/eclin… findings of cognitive deficits in people with long covid hold up they seem to be a strong reason to promote development of cognitive enhancer methods.
Were one to equate the deficits to IQ points and assume a population like this cohort (dodgy, of course) this corresponds to a mean decline of 0.1 IQ points across the population (~0.6 for covid cases). Smaller than typical childhood lead exposure numbers, but still...
While hopefully there is some neat single cause of the cognitive deficits that could be fixed directly, it looks to me more like a melange of bad stuff. Which really suggests a need for general purpose cognitive, energy and neuro-repair enhancers.
Got the idea of using sentences from @qntm's "Fine Structure" qntm.org/structure as input to VQGAN+CLIP. "It's like billion-voice music. The cities here are woven from constantly singing superstrings."
"A skyscraper whose ground floor is a human being but every other floor is filled with oozing alien organs and weird multidimensional sensors and wriggling feely things scraping against the metaphorical glass."
"'Oul' is the closest approximation in human language of the name of a cosmic eighty-plus-six-dimensional hyperweapon which fell out of the control of its creators."
#FridayPhysicsFun – This has been a month full of space news, with billionaires in space, nail biters when Nauka and Hubble glitched, test firing of the Super Heavy booster for Starship. But where are the limits to going *fast*? flic.kr/p/56Zfnf
Obviously Einstein blocks us at lightspeed, and Tsiolkovsky makes it expensive to use fast rockets. But I am more interested in locomotion in general.
Thinking a bit further: why is glue bad here? The deep reason is that performs an irreversible operation: to disassemble you need to go counter to the force of entropy. Usually with solvents or heat.
Unscrewing a screw is easier: overcome some friction to move the state along a certain path. Clips or Velcro are strictly speaking reversible: you invest a bit of energy in mechanical deformation that could in principle be recovered as they snap back.
Note that you do not want objects to be reversibly disassembable at equilibrium (they would slowly fall apart): energy or configuration barriers are fine. The tougher the environment, the higher or more complex they must be.
#FridayPhysicsFun – coming home after 6 months of absence implied a lot of dusting. Still almost nothing compared to the dust in Messier 64, the "Black Eye Galaxy". What and why is dust? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Eye…
“Dust” refers to fine particles of solid matter. It can be almost anything. But the smallness makes it behave different from larger pieces.