david_ar

> “The final section is intended to illustrate a possible future, though perhaps an improbable one,” Roberts said. “I wanted it to be dramatic, so it is an illustration of a particularly extreme outcome where literally all of the fossil fuels are burned, but I tried to keep the effects realistic otherwise, based on scientific articles I've read about such a hypothetical.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgx7nq/watch-four-billion-ye...

In the end I just downloaded some data for the Earth and went about seeing how well I could replicate climate maps with some simple curve fitting in a Jupyter notebook. After some trial and error, I was surprised to find that you could actually approximate things quite well with sine curves and some blurring, as described in the article.

Overall I learnt a lot about Earth systems from this project, it was a fun hobby for a few months. I have some ideas for taking it further, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions, or want to discuss any ideas you have about it.

"This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. [...] I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable."

--- George Orwell, 1942

It would kind of be great if they did though, it's not necessarily the same for everyone in the same geographic location.

https://www.lingoludo.com/lingotopia/

> A word salad is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases",[1] most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The words may or may not be grammatically correct, but are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them.

https://linux.die.net/man/1/dictzip

Especially when, in this context, we're talking about a rather peculiar type of intelligence, ie. the propensity to construct spacecraft and broadcast high-powered message-carrying radio signals. It seems very difficult to argue that there's any evolutionary pressure in favour of these behaviours, just given the time-lag from the development of our large brains to this.

Your brain does this all the time - the resolution of your eyes is actually quite poor compared to what you perceive (as much as a 25x difference). It's quite easy to demonstrate:

> For the most impressive results -- I guarantee you will be amazed -- use a dim room with no light apart from the computer screen; a pretty strong effect will still be seen even if the room has daylight coming into it, as long as it is not bright sunshine. Cut a slit about 1.5mm wide in the card. On the screen, display http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/Files.html

> Stand or sit sufficiently far away that you can only just read the text -- perhaps a distance of four metres or so, if you have normal vision. Now, hold the slit vertically in front of one of your eyes, and close the other eye. Hold the slit near to your eye -- brushing your eyelashes -- and look through it. Waggle the slit slowly to the left and to the right, so that the slit is alternately in front of the left and right sides of your pupil. What do you see? I see the red objects waggling to and fro, and the blue objects waggling to and fro, through huge distances and in opposite directions, while white objects appear to stay still and are negligibly distorted. Thin magenta objects can be seen splitting into their constituent red and blue parts. Measure how large the motion of the red and blue objects is -- it's more than 5 minutes of arc for me, in a dim room. Then check how sharply you can see under these conditions -- look at the text on the screen, for example: is it not the case that you can see (through your whole pupil) features far smaller than the distance through which the red and blue components were waggling? Yet when you are using the whole pupil, what is falling on your retina must be an image blurred with a blurring diameter equal to the waggling amplitude.

-- p553 of http://www.inference.org.uk/mackay/itila/book.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickness_behavior

> we suggest that stress shifts higher cognitive processing in a way that facilitates both engagement with and/or avoidance of the current stressor (i.e., fight or flight). By impairing executive control of cognition (i.e., working memory, cognitive inhibition, and cognitive flexibility), stress contributes to a reactive cognitive state that is fine-tuned to rapidly consider highly salient (i.e., stressor-related) information

> stress reallocates limited executive resources in adaptive ways [...] by impairing executive control over thoughts but improving executive control over motor actions [...] ideal for either fighting with or fleeing from a current stressor.

--- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5003767/

https://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-prese...

As the article says, the web browser is the most obvious component, but it also includes Google Cloud Print [0], Google Talk/Hangouts [1], Google Earth [2], Google Music [3], Gmail Offline [4], etc.

In some sense it's the spiritual successor to Google Desktop [5], which used to fill a similar role.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Cloud_Print

[1] https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2014/10/notification-re...

[2] visit https://www.google.com/earth/ in a browser other than Chrome

[3] https://support.google.com/googleplaymusic/answer/4627259

[4] https://support.google.com/a/answer/139154

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop

If anything this has the potential to help further decentralise the web, by allowing users to retrieve content via whatever protocol works best for them, without losing the benefits of URLs.