Perception: Chaos and Order | Dr. Karl Friston | #298

The title barely covers the subject matter. I don't have adequate words in a sentence or two to elaborate, but if you want to understand a little (or a lot) more about your brain, its chemistry and minimizing your entropy (disorder, randomness and uncertainty over time). And how to recognise states that either assist you in ameliorating entropy or identifying paths that will lead to greater entropy and then heading them off at the pass, then this is a podcast for you.

 

Lunatics running the climate asylum ... for profit.

This kind of idiocy genuinely beggars fucking belief. Make roofing materials white, have green roofs, cover public car parks with white materials or solar panels (or both), plant far more urban trees (and green spaces generally), have more running water in cities, and grow more tees around cities. 

As opposed to brainstorming (excuse my language) Utter cuntfest magic thinking, years down the line unimplementable expensive fuckwittery on a biblically epic scale. All the solutions are already available, but instead, some wilfully ill-informed twat or twats are empire-building (read as grabbing a share of the money cake), to achieve fuck all that couldn't already be achieved by existing technologies.

Some excerpts: 

1. The report floated the idea of spreading particles over the ocean at a cost of $100 per square mile. A one percent change in the reflectivity of the Earth would cost $500 million per year, which does “not seem excessive,” the report said, “considering the extraordinary economic and human importance of climate.”

2. Stratospheric aerosol injection would involve flying aircraft into the stratosphere, or between 10 miles and 30 miles skyward, and spraying a fine mist that would hang in the air, reflecting some of the sun’s radiation back into space.

3. Marine cloud brightening involves increasing the reflectivity of clouds that are relatively close to the surface of the ocean with techniques like spraying sea salt crystals into the air.

Remember, governments don't have any money except yours. 

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/13/what-is-solar-geoengineering-sunlight-reflection-risks-and-benefits.html

The Heat Is On: Bjorn Lomborg on the Summer’s Record Heat

Bjorn Lomborg with Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institute (Harvard University). How to fix climate change smartly, and not in a hypothetical future none of us will see.

 

John Vervaeke: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Ep. 9 - Insight

I started watching this episode weeks ago, but then as sometimes happens, life the universe and everything got in the way, time disappeared, a flat was decorated, stuff moved to storage, social events happened, and insane long walks and expeditions consumed hours and days. 

On reflection, it was the pursuit of meaning, the pursuit of higher ideals ... not goals per see, though it would be fair to say some of it was tests of self (I passed :-) A* ). 

This is another of those technical episodes and I had to watch it again from the start and may have to watch it over again. I'm glad I did, I'm glad I took an inadvertent break, because on returning to the subject matter I found I saw stuff that I'd either missed previously or more likely, had been trying to `cram' due to a certain impatience (having and being mode), the having in this instance is trying to obtain the sum of someone's years of knowledge and work in a few short hours of YouTube videos.

Now as Autumn deepens and the evenings draw in there will be less desire for the outside in cold and dark, and more time for `higher pursuits' (that term is covered in this episode). 

It would be fair to say, I have wandered innocently from the path, I have made much of me physically and much of the world outside, and now it is time to reflect, and Mr Vervaeke will be my guide.

Mushrooms and mycelium

I trained as a tree surgeon some eighteen years ago, and while I was on the course we learned about mycorrhizae, and inoculating planting holes to allow trees to form symbiotic relationships with mycelial networks, to extend the root networks and allow the tree and the mycelial mat to exchange materials: enzyme reduced minerals to the tree, broken down by the fungi, and sugars and starches passed to the mycelial network by the tree. At the time it was all new knowledge, as was growing trees in square holes, not round holes.

Nearly twenty years later (and it took ten years or more to get as far as garden centres and Gardeners World), mycorrhizae are standard tools for any sensible arborist and anyone who wants to give a freshly planted tree the best chance in life. 

This video is about more than mycelial networks and mushrooms. It's proper science, give it a listen and or a watch and be amazed at the body of information contained within.