Early Friday Five: April 10, 2020

[brin_bellway]

[cw: food, (mild) illness]


1. What’s the weather outside your window doing right now? If that’s not inspiring, what’s the weather like somewhere you wish you could be?

It's pretty picturesque, actually! Blue sky, fluffy white clouds, Canadian flags fluttering in the breeze. The deciduous trees haven't leafed out yet, but other than that it's looking good out there.


2a. What’s for breakfast?

An orange. Normally a President's Choice cranberry-yogurt fibre bar, but it's Passover and time to mix things up. (I will probably still eat a fibre bar at *some* point today, though, for medical reasons.)

2b. Lunch?

Chocolate, followed by charoset, followed by an almond-cheddar biscuit. Normally peanut butter on a spoon (followed by a smaller amount of chocolate in the mid-afternoon), but see above.

2c. Dinner?

A seder feast: token bite of holiday turkey, a hard-boiled egg, more charoset, probably another orange, broccoli, plus things that I refuse to eat even a token bite of like chopped liver and chicken soup. Around 1.5 hours after we finish that we will meet back for Passover birthday Passover cake, and hopefully we will actually remember to do the afikomen hunt, unlike yesterday.


3. What are things you can’t go without?

I mean, there's the obvious stuff: food, water, sleep. There's things I have to be actively careful to get enough of, like fibre and video games. There's things where I've put vast quantities of effort into making sure they stay available, like my blog archives.


4. How did your parents choose your name?

Pretty; Biblical; not recently used by family; common enough that native speakers, at least, will know how to handle it.


5. If you could travel back in time, where and when would you go?

This is a very underspecified question. Do I have to worry about destroying my timeline? Can I get vaccinated against smallpox first? Can I consult with a bunch of historians about what things they wish they knew more about?

Comments

[contrarianarchon]

... ah breakfast. What a horrible idea.

I'm interested that your first response to traveling back in time is "collect historical data"; mine is "google shares"

[brin_bellway]

Having a full-on, cooked and/or complicated Meal for breakfast does indeed strike me as a terrible idea. Who wants to go through so much effort so early in the day?

(I wonder how common it is to actually do that. When I've been at Girl Guide camps/sleepovers/etc they had a full meal for breakfast, but OTOH sleepovers are special occasions, and maybe that was special-occasion food. I don't know how much to trust things like sitcoms to depict family breakfasts accurately.)

But eating a granola bar 1 - 3 hours after waking up suits me nicely. (Another thing I don't understand about breakfast is people who eat it without waiting at *least* an hour, often more like two or three. My stomach does *not* wake up right away.)

(I used to use single-serving yogurt cups, but they're much more expensive and the shelf life is much shorter (so you can't exploit sales as much). Fibre was not originally a consideration, but switching from my original low-fibre granola bars to high-fibre bars turned out to be an easy way to add more fibre when popcorn wasn't enough.)

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If I have to *choose* between "collect historical data" and "exploit knowledge of future for financial gain", I'm picking the first one: I still have a chance to make money in other ways later, and possibly people will even give me money for the data.

But if I can't get a smallpox vaccine first (severely limiting the usefulness of data-gathering, as I would absolutely refuse to go to any part of spacetime where smallpox is endemic while unvaccinated)†, there is a distinct possibility that the best use of the trip for me is something like "go to ~2010, gather bitcoins, bring wallet recovery key back with me to the future". I figure this is *probably* more feasible than stock-market fuckery, mostly in that there is a lot less bureaucracy to circumvent. For all anyone knows I *might* have gathered a bunch of bitcoins during my first time through 2010, lost the key, and only just now found it again! You can't prove that isn't what happened! Maybe I was just so embarrassed to have fucked myself over so badly that I never talked about it!

(And meanwhile in 2010, I don't *actually* have to steal my past self's identity to get anything done, since bitcoin-wallet identities aren't tied to any other identities by default. At worst I have to steal some computing power, and that computing power doesn't need to have belonged to any specific person.)

Basically, bitcoins are still more or less a bearer instrument, while stocks have accreted a lot more legal-status-of-ownership stuff around them. Also, wallet recovery keys are specifically designed to be feasible to memorise, so if I have any trouble regarding "ability to bring physical objects back", that's not a dealbreaker.

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†One of the other respondents to this meme said they would refuse to take the time-travel trip, on the grounds that they might be carrying COVID-19 and they wouldn't want to risk starting the plague early. I'd considered this concern during my own contemplation but dismissed it, figuring that of *course* I would have to spend a couple weeks in self-isolation before setting off, just as astronauts do before going to the International Space Station.

[contrarianarchon]

That does seem like a much more effective plan than my "fuck around in the 90s" scheme, yes. (Though I was assuming a somewhat pre-stockmarket approach re: google funds; my money is so much more useful if I can use it as part of the angel investment and such; this does mean that you're in the eye of history a lot more though, but such is the price of trying to obtain personal power through "right place, right time"; actually now that I think of it, it'd be kinda fun to iterate on that - do the same thing four or five times, just compounding resources; it's unrealistic, you'd muck with the timeline too much but wow would it be funny to be known in secret circles as "That one immortal guy who comes out of the woodwork to make The Perfect Investment" like a capitalist doctor who)

(These answers are all assuming that changing the world is off the table; do you think there are any tipping points you could constructively/interestingly put a hand on if you actually had a time-machine and were willing to re-write history? That last one seems like it'd be a really big caveat but you're *good* at these plans and I want to here what you have to say. I'm gonna take a stab and guess that smallpox vaccines will be involved?).

[brin_bellway]

>>That last one seems like it'd be a really big caveat but you're *good* at these plans and I want to here what you have to say. I'm gonna take a stab and guess that smallpox vaccines will be involved?<<

:D

God, I saw a *T-shirt* once on some online store, with the front covered in tips for what things to kickstart if you found yourself permanently trapped in the past and didn't care about trying to preserve the original future. (The (presumably joking) idea was that you should wear the T-shirt so that you'd have it on you in the event of getting sucked into a temporal anomaly.) Vaccination was definitely on that list: even if you don't have any vaccinia virus on hand (because they're assuming you didn't have a chance to prepare), straight-up cowpox is a huge improvement over smallpox, and even variolation is an improvement if you can't get cowpox either.

Last time I was telling someone about that shirt I couldn't find the link, but let me try again...oh hey, here it is! (Apparently the tricks were to include the phrase "take the credit" (which I remembered word-for-word) *and* dig as far as result #20, well after the results *seem* to stop being remotely relevant. That gets you a post talking about it with a blurry image and a broken buy link, but the store they link to *does* still carry it if you try the search function.

(Note: if *that* store link breaks too, the Wayback capture won't be good enough because it can't switch to the closeup on the text: check out this poster version instead.))

Anyway: that guide doesn't go into how to convince the people around you to adopt your ideas, so it can't be where I heard the one "If you try to tell people about boiling water to kill germs, you will sound insane. Instead, introduce your new homeland to tea: convince them to boil water because it's *tasty* and the health benefits will follow."

As for things other than germ reduction, I hear that artificial nitrogen fixation (to mass-produce fertilizer) was one of the main sticking points in developing a more prosperous civilization: there's probably some interesting stuff to be done there. I'd have to do a bunch more research to figure out what importing the Haber-Bosch process to the past would look like, which prerequisites you'd need (apparently the reactor needs to be able to create/withstand pretty high pressures, so we'll likely need to work on that for one thing).

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>>this does mean that you're in the eye of history a lot more though, but such is the price of trying to obtain personal power through "right place, right time"<<

I doubt I could pull it off: it seems like it would require a lot of fluent lying and general thinking-on-your-feet. While I do think fairly *well* (thanks!), I do *not* think *quickly*, and all too often I find myself with insufficient mental bandwidth to keep up with a fast-paced situation.

(I don't know whether I'd want a *qualitative* intelligence augmentation--thinking *better* thoughts seems like it could have weird identity issues, best to (at minimum) have someone else go first--but I would absolutely love a *quantitative* intelligence augmentation, to be able to think the *same* thoughts *faster*.

Hmm. Does caffeine do that? I wouldn't want to become *dependent* on caffeine, but it might be worth taking on occasion depending on how I react to it. I keep meaning to try it out and then not getting around to it.)

Whereas the bitcoin thing seems like it would require very little of talking anybody into anything: maybe "hi, yes, I would like to buy some computers and a hotel room in cash that totally doesn't have ten more years of wear-and-tear on it than you'd expect from its issue dates". (And if you kick the starting-funds problem back a step--sell old jewellery† to a [pawn shop]/[scrap-metal merchant] for local currency?--that conversation could get even less tricky.)

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*rereading comment before finalising the draft* Wait, hang on, take a *stab* at vaccines being involved. I get the joke now! (A joke you may or may not have intended!)

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†At least a decade old: there's no reason to take the risk of it getting recycled into itself and causing an infinite-aging-loop paradox.

[contrarianarchon]

(sorry I lost this tab for a while)

I have seen this t-shirt, it's a cool one. I might have an image of it in the older image-files, but my images aren't sorted very well right now so I don't care do go digging.

I haven't looked it up but the Haber-Bosch process is, to my understanding pretty dependent on getting a very good high pressure/temperature vessel (also given modern demand for the stuff I'm given to understand that an integer-percentage of the current world power supply is spent on the process); there are probably a whole lot of relatively easy optimizations that you can make on a lower level than that? Seagull shit and crop rotation are important precursor solutions to the same problem, from memory.

Stab pun entirely unintended, I'm afraid.