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  • All the coal in the ground was made in one specific period of history when trees were "new" and there was nothing that broke down dead trees for food. Trees that die now do not become coal. No new coal is being made.

    • That whole story about how long it took for fungus or anything to evolve to the point it could break down trees was a fascinating surprise to me, that also highlighted how evolution works.

      However nowadays, I see it mostly as important to share from the perspective of both climate change and cultural resilience. We all know the connection to climate change, but ….

      I love watching apocalypse movies, but an op Ed I read really struck home. The premise was that if there were enough of a disaster to knock humanity back a century or more, we would never be able to recover. So many easy sources of energy through fossil fuels have been picked clean to where they are no longer recoverable without modern technology, and we can’t get back to modern technology without Easy sources of energy. Fossil fuels in general were created once. There are no new ones created. But there are no substitutes that would let a re-building society pass that level of development.

      • That's a very interesting story if you think about it. I would say that it is possible to reach our technology level again without fossil fuels. It just takes a lot longer. The biggest issue for this is getting materials as steel or copper. Wind turbines are relatively simple and don't need that much technology. As a more stable form of energy production we have trees and bio mass. It would cost a lot of our trees to get back to our current state, but I think it's possible. You just have to remember to not make the same mistakes again.

  • Here's a summary of a few passion project research holes I went down over the past few years (citations available):

    • It's very likely that the Gospel of Thomas was related to the writings of Lucretius, there's a high chance the historical Jesus was talking about indivisible parts of matter (atomism) and a decent chance he was talking about natural selection, both ideas extensively found in Lucretius in some cases with near identical language to what's both canonical and apocryphal
    • Nefertiti ("beautiful woman who arrived") and the story of Helen of Troy have some remarkable overlaps, particularly given Herodotus's account of Helen ending up in Egypt the whole time - and the two datable parts of Herodotus's version both line up with the 18th dynasty, which was parallel to the Mycenaean conquest of Anatolia
    • Ramses II was described as appearing to be a Lybian Berber in his forensic examination, and had around 50 sons, which makes the ancient claims the story of Danaus (the Lybian ruler who was brother to a Pharoh with 50 sons) occurred in the 19th dynasty a bit more intriguing
    • There may have been some truth to a Moses/Mopsus narrative at the tail end of the 19th dynasty, but it would have related to the twelve groups of tribes of Anatolian peoples captured by Ramses II at Kadesh and some of their later actions as part of the confederation referred to as "the sea peoples" - this lines up more closely with Greek and Egyptian accounts of the Exodus tale as multiethnic or including Greek ancestors too. Some of those sea peoples were later forcibly relocated to the Southern Levant where there was cohabitation near the local Israelites who later on have stories about these events, talk about Dan "staying on their ships" or trading with Tyre alongside the Greeks, and recent archeology has found Aegean style pottery made with local clay in Tel Dan or the only apiary in the "land of milk and honey" importing Anatolian bees in Tel Rehov, which starts to cast a very different picture of some old stories

    • What's on your research agenda now? Like, what is an unanswered question (with respect to your own knowledge) that you're curious about?

      • Most of my attention has shifted over to following emerging research on large language models. Right now my key focus there is relating to alignment strategies. I've had a strong suspicion since GPT-4 released that the way in which the most recent models are being fine tuned throws away a lot of valuable skills outside what we measure for, and that instead an alignment strategy more similar to the interplay between intrusive thoughts and the prefrontal cortex would achieve more consistent alignment results without sacrificing capabilities. There's been a few papers over the last year (and even just the last few weeks) that are starting to support similar findings.

        In terms of history stuff, there's still a few odd details I might circle back to, but it mostly feels like I hit diminishing returns unless we see significant new discoveries in materials (which I actually hope we will as LLMs become capable enough to translate into English the extensive bodies of untranslated but discovered works like the Oxy papyri).

        One is to follow up on a line of inquiry I'd find relating to grammatical fingerprinting of Paul's epistles. There was a 2017 psych study that found vulnerable narcissists have a greater degree of personal reference in their writing, and he's always struck me a bit of that type ("I'm the least of the apostles" fluctuating with "I'm not less than the greatest of the apostles"). When I analyzed the letters in English, there's significantly more personal reference in the undisputed Pauline letters than non-Pauline Epistles. But the really interesting part is the disputed letters. Only one falls within the range of the undisputed letters in its frequency of personal reference, and it's one that most scholars have historically thought was forged (2 Timothy). At some point I'll come back around to doing a similar analysis on the original Greek.

        Another recent thread I may look more into would be the Mediterranean parallels for terms translating as "Great Lady" in the LBA and early Iron Age. There's some weird nuances to a term like that being applied in the Bible to various women, particularly alleged around women connected to the Egyptian pharoh's household - but when I cross referenced Egyptian records around the relevant time I only see a similar translated term being applied to a Hittite queen who was co-signing the world's first extant treaty. So now I'm wondering if either (a) the association with Egypt in the OT was an anachronistic rationalization for a foreign concept that was actually originating from Anatolia (like the bees and potentially the tribe of Dan) or (b) if it really did relate to Egypt but because of one or more queens coming from Anatolia marrying into the Pharoh's household. If the latter, it might help narrow down specifically which dynasties a few alleged events were supposed to have been occurring.

  • When you love someone, you can’t hear enough about their current hyper fixations. “Would you shut up”, “Nobody cares”. These are things I heard a lot as a kid. I had to reach my 30s to finally feel the magic of “Please tell me more”.

    I can geek out about 40K, Dune, ASOIAF, Dark Souls. And my girlfriend smiles at me and is happy I am getting exited like a child. It really is something when you give a 20 minute lecture about Necron history and get questions about the specifics. Just yesterday, when we went to bed, she wanted me to talk about Rincewind and Discworld. FREAKING RINCEWIND! When can you talk about him?! She loves to listen to me and I love to listen to her.

    Don’t let shit people spoil the fun for you. You are beautiful, your weird hobbies and fixations are beautiful. Go find a good person who will be weird together with you.

    • I am a software engineer, my wife lets me ramble about all sorts of development and other nerdy things related all the time without a single complaint.

      She is my rubber duck, which I apologize to her for :D

    • Rincewind is my fav character next to DEATH

  • I'm fascinated by this woodworking tool called the Festool Domino. It's got the form factor of a biscuit joiner, but it's a router instead of a circular saw, so it cuts a deep, short, wide mortise to receive a loose tenon they call a Domino.

    This tool is still protected under patent by its inventor, it's brand new. But the type of joinery it's for - loose tenons - are older than writing. Prehistoric wooden structures have been found held together with loose tenons. Some 8,000 years we've been making mortise and tenon joints, and the technology is STILL under development.

    • How'd the prehistorics make them? Drill two holes and chisel out between? Or did they pre-date drills and chisels?

      • Behold the world's oldest intact wooden structure. The frame of a well dated to 7,000 years ago found near Lake Constance. I don't think it is known for sure how it was made, but the linked article talks about experimental archaeology using stone axes and adzes and chisels/gouges made of bone and antler. I'm not sure drills were invented yet.

        By the time of the ancient Egyptians they had gotten remarkably sophisticated. Even by the pre-dynastic period some 5,000 years ago they had copper saws, chisels, axes and adzes, and bow drills. Egyptian ships were often constructed with mortise and tenon joints which would be secured with through-holes and dowel pins to lock them in place. They would use mortise and tenons to build furniture, examples found in tombs survive today. These would be glued with hide glue and often reinforced by lashing with cordage. The oldest varnished wood pieces are ancient Egyptian. A third kingdom coffin contains the oldest known plywood.

        Few other activities connect me to ALL of human history quite like woodworking. My workshop is full of tools that are made of glass reinforced nylon and aluminum, driven by digitally controlled brushless DC motors powered by lithium polymer batteries, turning tungsten carbide blades and bits...and I use these state of the art 21st century tools to create wooden joinery older than horseback riding.

  • I know from personal experience what it's like to spend a few minutes passionately pouring your heart out about something that fascinates you to someone only to find out they were barely listening. I will either hear someone out or try to stop them before they get too far if I know I'm just not going to be interested in it.

    Because there's hearing about people's passions and then there's being too polite to tell a guy to shut the fuck up about your little ring you got that's going to help you with archery that you've been talking about for half an hour because we're trying to play D&D here. (Years later and I'm still annoyed I didn't try to bring that monologue to an end 20 minutes earlier).

    EDIT: I just realized those two paragraphs are unrelated. My personal experience was me doing the same thing to someone else and realizing (in much, much less than half an hour) that it wasn't worth my time.

  • Ya know, the Appalachians are old enough that they're split across the Atlantic Ocean.

    The international Appalachian trail is a thing.

    Plus, there's sections of the Appalachiana in the south that ended up being "settled" by people from where the biggest section of be Appalachians in Ireland exist. There's a major Scots-Irish population in my neck of the woods.

    "Settled" refers to the fact that there were already people in the area as a whole, so saying that the Europeans that took the land settled it is a a matter of not having a better word to use that wouldn't also require an explanation.

  • Listening to people who are passionate about something is fantastic, especially if they're good at it where they can get you excited too

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