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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: February 28th, 2024

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  • What absurd opening logic. The first person is a rocket engineer. He doesn’t just play Kerbel Space, he designs rockets.

    The schematics for Starship allows for at best 15-20 people. Supplies are a thing. The ability for humans to travel & survive for this distance is not established at all, nor is the ability to build structures, grow food, supply air & water, etc

    Psychological effects: with a few hundred people, same as in any small society.

    This confident nonsense is like discussing reality with an Iraq War Cheerleader Circa 2004-2007 .

    There’s no plan. To get to the Moon, Starship itself requires ~-15 refueling launches using a method that doesn’t exist, despite the taxpayers giving the company 300+ million dollars to develop it.


  • Built in correction is a good idea, but adding a feedback method that allows polite corrections and additional details is my thinking. Not everyone can spell and we all fail to communicate properly. My brain switches their/they’re/there when writing, but notices the mistake when reviewing. The preview option here is great and is on my list. What was great about Reddit Is Fun is it remembered your unposted replies if you clicked away: free draft saving

    I use Reddit to process my thoughts and build up my own lines of thought over time. My posts are heavily edited, because while it’s an immediate experience, just post and forget, the content is not (“but you said a month ago…”). I don’t care about Karma, I care that the writing is good. We’re building and then repeating & refining our posts over time anyways. The posts are new each day, but the subjects, issues, etc are not and our thinking is both enhanced by writing and developed across each new comment over time as we reencounter those subjects (“When I first heard about it i thought _____, but now I think ___”).

    The reddit ecosystem and usage are counterproductive. I use it as a working journal, rough drafts with free editors, fact checkers, researchers (quality will vary, but search engine research is a click away).

    What happens is conversations get derailed, by both ego and interruption. My goal is a more productive and positive user experience. Forget Karma, sometimes down votes are good. I’ve been thinking about and designing a user experience that uses the format better.

    Example: Reddit comments vs private chat. Combine them, with individual discussions fixed, then others can comment on that discussion. I think when we post we should be able to pin replies we like at the top.

    I can’t go into too many such details (NDA required!).











  • “We prefer slight amounts of deviation. We like a little imperfection because this gives life to the sounds, and that is attractive to us.”

    Math, Music & Movement: The Missy Elliot SupaDupa Law™

    Humans think they’re pretty cool. If there is a language of the universe, it’s Mathematics and we’re pretty good at math. A very smart Jesuit I knew once said this ability to do complex math might be evidence for God, since there’s no evolutionary reason for humans to be able to do geometry, differential equations, physics, etc. Or is there?

    I can’t dance well either, I’m no good at sports & billiards ain’t my thing. But I’m not falling down all the time, am I? I can still play such games good enough. And I can still catch a suddenly falling object, my brain calculating in micro seconds which arm to use, which body shift, where to grab and when to close my hand, even compensating for the object’s structure to avoid say, a sharp point. That’s all math, faster than any written equation that explains a neutron star.

    Walking, typing, dancing, hitting a ball are all possible because the body-mind connection is doing complex, unwritten calculations all the time & at the speed of electricity (?). Without external knowledge systems, like books and libraries, the smartest humans noticed and developed understanding of the movement patterns of the Moon, Sun & Stars, building Stonehenge, etc. At night an African looooong ago started noticing a star at a different place each night, using some distinct mountain range’s silhouette to do so. They didn’t develop a concept of a calendar due to the demands of fixed agriculture, but developed a mental library of data processing that coordinated such situations along with the patterns of wild plants, weather, animal migration, etc. All without paper.

    I think these capabilities aren’t a connection to a God, but proof we can all “speak” the language of the universe without being taught it directly. As a baby we are developing our coordination, that math, or we’d never survive as a species.

    Music, of course, is patterns, but wilder; with the young today constantly developing new patterns that are often challenging at first listen and annoying to the old who are set in their ways, their minds dead from following dead patterns like commuting to work with Classic Rock, hating their kid’s music and sticking with the same thing they loved as a teenager which their parents hated.

    We prefer slight amounts of deviation. We like a little imperfection because this gives life to the sounds, and that is attractive to us.

    And that preference is invigorating! Missy Elliot is one of the most creative pop stars of the last few decades. As she got older she got more seemingly dissonant and uneven. Her later music stops and jerks at odd moments, the patterns are anything but familiar - at first. But there’s method to both the music & live body movement that makes Parents & Republicans mad. And it’s glorious and alive:

    https://youtu.be/hHcyJPTTn9w?si=Min1xqnlwMECd-NX

    My brain is much more flexible than many my age, because, I calculate, they’re stuck in old loops, commuting to work with the same narrow range of cassic Rock music they loved as a teen, courtesy of Morning Zoo DJ’s doing the same basic thing 5 days a week.

    I see patterns many my age do not (in part because such observations rightly imply failure & guilt, like Iraq is my Generations’ Vietnam and there are no excuses this time). I believe part of this is I keep up with the music, seeking out the newest beats that often are the most criticized by brain’s slowly dying. There’s nothing wrong with a good pop song -everybody loves Katy Perry, but jazz and hip hop are constantly challenging the listeners with new disturbances and challenges that are still grounded in that math our mind makes, only it’s new formulas that exist in sound and movement only, no paper required

    “Free your mind and your ass will follow” sang En Vogue. But maybe it’s the other way around.

    Get your freak on, you’re all math geniuses and you don’t even know it.

    https://youtu.be/FPoKiGQzbSQ?si=RQJOLRjASR5Kt2mj

    (?) = maybe I’m off or a better term exists.