baltakatei

/ˈbɑːltəkʊteɪ/. Knows some chemistry and piping stuff. TeXmacs user.

Website: reboil.com

Mastodon: baltakatei@twit.social

  • 162 Posts
  • 275 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • From Hitler’s American Model which documents how Nazis were inspired by American race law to effect their racial purification policies:

    Nazi law was different, Hanke declares, because the German laws of the early 1930s were “but one step on the stair to the gas chambers.” Unlike American segregation laws, which simply applied the principle of “separate but equal,” German laws were part of a program of extermination. Now part of the problem with this argument, which Hanke is by no means alone in offering, is that its historical premise is false: It is simply not the case that the drafters of the Nuremberg laws were already aiming at the annihilation of the Jews in 1935. The concern of early Nazi policy was to drive the Jewish population into exile, or at the very least to marginalize it within the borders of the Reich, and there were serious conflicts among Nazi policy makers about how to achieve even that goal.


  • I recall a joke thought experiment me and some friends in high school had when discussing how answer keys for final exams were created. Multiple choice answer keys are easy to imagine: just lists of letters A through E. However, when we considered the essay portion of final exams, we joked that perhaps we could just be presented with five entire completed essays and be tasked with identifying, A through E, the essay that best answered the prompt. All without having to write a single word of prose.

    It seems that that joke situation is upon us.














  • See Hitler’s American Model (2017) which talks about how Nazi lawyers were attracted to how the US built itself on the tradition of common law as opposed to the more European and relatively inflexible tradition of civil law. Government under common law may change rapidly as judges overturn precedent, opening a window for demagogues such as Trump a way to quickly reform government in their favor before a majority of the populace, with their often passive consequence-centered de facto method of understanding political decisions, can oppose the changes.




  • Personally, I think a definition of life can be boiled down to whether something can record and then selectively rebroadcast information patterns in a different medium. Intelligence is a function of how long a delay there can be between recording and rebroadcast in addition to how much information is transcribed.

    Transcribing DNA/RNA into peptide chains obviously meets the criteria.

    Wildfires are ruled out since, although wildfires can propagate themselves, information in fuel is almost immediately lost during combustion; if wildfires are alive, it is only in combination with other life forms that can selectively preserve and sacrifice parts of themselves through fire, such as pine cones requiring fire to clear away undergrowth for new sprouts.

    A computer meets the criteria, but the selectivity of information storage has historically been tightly controlled by humans. It’s more accurate to say humans and computers form an augmented hybrid lifeform.