Building and Thinking
SESIG—Jon's Parkinson's diagnosis, education changes, what is life discussion, Conway's Game of Life, artificial life and consciousness. Resolved book club scheduling. Investigated turkey broth paste. Unpacked smoker—instructions buried deeply. Picked up new travel backpack. Groceries. Worked on smoker. Walked to Suds for beer, met Michael, Mary, Tim. Michael and Mary gave ride home. Ancient Civilizations—Rome series begins. Finished assembling smoker watching Hogan's Heroes. Woke middle of night, ordered Scottevest replacement.
Big Questions and Concrete Tasks
December 6, 2025
These notes describe the events of Friday, 12/5/2025.
Woke up with balance difficulties. Not dizzy, just had a hard time staying upright. Weird sensation—body not quite responding to normal equilibrium signals. Eventually wore off, but unsettling while it lasted. The kind of physical anomaly that makes you pay attention, wonder what's happening, hope it doesn't return.
Attended SESIG. Jon shared his recent Parkinson's diagnosis—symptoms are manageable and treatable, handling it with characteristic directness and pragmatism. The conversation moved to education changes: schools moving away from traditional letter grades to competency-based assessment, de-emphasizing standardized tests like SATs, focusing more on student projects and experiences.
Jon led an extensive discussion about what constitutes life. Attributes of life include complexity and coherence, with fire and crystals as bounding examples (fire and crystals are not life, but life exists somewhere in between). Carbon-based molecules introduce the complexity—carbon with its four valence electrons closest to the nucleus creates ideal conditions for complex chemistry. Silicon is the distant second. Ribosomes are the mechanism worth studying, found in all Earth-based life. The role of solvents matters—water's widespread presence throughout the universe. The question of required dynamism. OSU is changing the conversation about ribosomes. We're looking everywhere we can look rather than where we think life might be.
Rajeev presented Conway's Game of Life, demonstrating how simple rules create emergent complexity. Invented by mathematician John Conway in 1970, popularized in Scientific American. Used to study emergent behavior, self-organizing systems, cellular automata, artificial life. Most initial configurations either die, stabilize, or oscillate. Life is computationally universal—a Life configuration could conceivably evolve into an intelligent being. Basis of Stephen Wolfram's new view of science.
The discussion expanded to definitions of consciousness, 3D Game of Life and higher dimensionality, whether this relates to consciousness. Wolfram explored emergent complexity. Github as a training corpus for AI. Turing test pass/fail criteria. AI issues such as model collapse when AI consumes its own output. The trolley car problem. The Igem competition in synthetic biology—high school students using CRISPR. How do things become life? Top country music song today is completely AI generated. SETI—radio is too narrow a window in time, should look at spectrograph work. Two different searches: extraterrestrial life and extraterrestrial intelligence. References to Bobiverse series and Permutation City by Greg Egan.
After SESIG, did a little personal research on nucleosynthesis in general to get a better handle on the relative availability of different elements. Trying to understand the iron inflection point between different forms of nucleosynthesis—where fusion stops being energy-producing and starts requiring energy input, why elements lighter than iron form through stellar fusion while heavier elements require supernovae. The SESIG discussion about carbon versus silicon raised questions about elemental abundance. Not clear the research made it more clear, but it's interesting—the fundamental physics that determines what elements exist in what quantities throughout the universe.
Read Ian Page's note about phosphorus availability. He argues phosphorus is essential for all life with no substitutes, poured onto fields and washing to the sea without recycling except briefly through the food chain. Reserve estimates vary wildly from 30 to 1000 years depending on price. New concern: lithium iron phosphate batteries in China now consuming 6-7% of the available phosphate and competing with agriculture. Battery consumption doubling yearly. Unlike agriculture, phosphate in batteries is recyclable, but flow is a problem during buildout. There are some phosphorus recovery technologies from sewage as an example, though not clear how widely implemented or economically viable. Would be interesting to create a model showing the phosphorus system—the flows, the stocks, the competing demands, the recovery pathways, the temporal dynamics.
Watched Peter Zeihan video about coming global depression. He argues it's structural and has been developing a long time—demographics and deglobalization are the driving forces, baked into the system since the world urbanized and industrialized nearly a century ago. Trump's tariff policies are just accelerating the timeline by destroying what little fabric holds these systems together. Forwarded it to James and Travis, but it just sounds like fear rather than an actionable prompt. The question is: if you see something like this coming, how do you position yourself for it? Gut tells me there's a decreasing window to take advantage of irrational exuberance and denial, but at some point it makes sense to hunker down. Instinctual response is to buy more stuff, move to real tangible wealth, but there are balancing forces against this and complications trying to guess what buying power means post-meltdown.
Resolved the book club scheduling issues. Too many conflicts on December 18—ended up just canceling that meeting. We'll meet again on January 8. Sometimes the simplest solution is to skip the problematic date rather than trying to force coordination around competing commitments.
 |
| Random picture of my Thanksgiving plate |
Worked on unpacking the smoker. Assumed there were no included instructions—found the assembly instructions online and printed a copy. They were terrible. Eventually found a YouTube video of someone assembling it—the YouTuber seemed just as frustrated as I was. Later discovered the same terrible instructions had been buried deeply in the packaging all along. Had proceeded assuming they weren't even there. The shared frustration of poorly documented consumer products, people helping each other figure out what the manufacturer failed to explain clearly. Having been in product development roles for most of my career, I get pretty frustrated with sloppy and ill-considered implementations. Someone designed this, someone approved it, someone let it ship this way.
Picked up the new travel backpack. It's interesting—different design than previous packs, new approach to organizing gear and distributing weight. Evaluating how it will work for upcoming trips.
Bought ingredients for making soup and sandwiches—planning for upcoming meals, stocking the kitchen with what's needed for simple, satisfying food.
Continued working on the smoker. The assembly process taking longer than expected but progress being made. Learning the components, understanding how they fit together, preparing for eventual use.
Walked to Suds for beer, met Michael, Mary, and Tim there. The regular Friday gathering, conversation flowing across topics, the familiar rhythm of Beer:30. Michael and Mary gave me a ride home afterward—the convenience of not having to walk back in the dark.
Watched Ancient Civilizations. The beginning of a series of lectures about Rome—the historical sweep beginning, the patterns that shaped Western civilization. The transition from the Han Dynasty episode to Roman history creating interesting comparative perspectives.
Turned on Hogan's Heroes and finished assembling the smoker. The combination of mindless entertainment and hands-on work, getting the final pieces in place while watching formulaic comedy. The smoker now ready for its first use.
Woke up in the middle of the night and ordered what I hope will be an effective replacement for my Scottevest. The late-night shopping, the practical need for functional travel clothing, hoping the new option delivers what the Scottevest provided.
The day moved from physical oddity through intellectual exploration to practical tasks and social connection. Balance difficulties creating morning concern. SESIG covering profound questions about life, consciousness, and artificial intelligence. Book club logistics resolved. Smoker assembled. Social evening at Suds. Late-night practical shopping. Thinking about resource constraints and economic disruption.
Friday combined philosophical depth with mundane necessity. Jon's Parkinson's diagnosis handled with directness. Discussion of what constitutes life reaching from carbon chemistry to Conway's Game of Life to consciousness and AI. The connections between simple rules and emergent complexity, between artificial and biological systems, between searching for extraterrestrial intelligence and creating artificial intelligence. Smoker assembly representing concrete progress on a practical project. Phosphorus and economic collapse thoughts highlighting resource constraints and systemic vulnerabilities. The questions about positioning for disruption remaining unanswered but persistent.
Comments
Post a Comment