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Oh it won’t end

It’s a bit like why drilling into a wall might make the lights go out if you hit a cable. Your brain only registers “feeling” in any part of your body because a nerve carried that information to it. The nerves from your lower arm and hand pass your elbow. Hitting the nerve directly causes signals in it which you brain interprets as pain in your fingers. Presumably the nerves for the pinky side of your hand are slightly more exposed.

Practically speaking since war is unthinkable is would result in as much economic isolation as Europe can bear. It would be the end of NATO. Almost immediately there’s be European voices saying ‘What’s the real harm?’ and other appeasers. I think the political lash back would only last 5-10 years as parties opposed would find the only tool at hand - economic punishment - to be unsustainable. It would legitimise nationalistic sentiments in Europe even further. Britain would, naturally, talk of betrayal but not be able to make any resistance of any substance.

♫ … Now don’t be sad, 'cause two out of three ain’t bad… ♫

And as a result there are 8 or 9 rivers called “Avon” in the UK…

I’ve heard various explanations, I don’t know how accurate the following is. I’d be interested to learn more:

• the very earliest colony settlements had to bargain hard and with precision in order to survive. It began a contractual culture that eventually extended into litigation

• due to high immigration from many differing backgrounds, disputes had to be settled in litigation rather than relying on social understanding

• the religious culture was largely inherited from the Puritans who had a legalistic and inflexible reading of the new testament. (This unwillingness to compromise is why they were persecuted in Europe and fled to the new world)

• the American identity is ‘invented’ (in the sense that’s it’s an abrupt mixing of many old world cultures) and so national identity was initially based on cerebral activities (the Constitution, Bill of Rights) rather than evolved from a very long history of social bonds found in old world ‘nations’. This required a cerebral precision to be at the heart of identity which easily extended to legal rights and relations

As I say, take with a pinch of salt. But this is the gist of what I’ve heard from people who know more than me.

If you want to try an ‘old world’ replacement, the England v France rugby match from 8th Feb (part of the six nations tournament) was great

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What are the top signs someone’s having a stroke?

It’s that after the wash cycle or after the drying? Pretty normal for towels that are heavy with water to be pinned to the drum after a high spin. But if they don’t then tumble off during drying (or are physically caught on something) then yeah something’s wrong. (You could just try a lower spin cycle)

There are plenty of portable second screens for laptops now. But it seems weird you can’t just hardwire a second laptop without having to resort to internet based screen sharing solutions.

I’m pretty sure in that case the sound alone would kill us…

If anything like this was ever done it’s more likely it would be independent drones flying ahead of the plane at its 10 and 2 o’clock

Really makes me wonder what cybernetics will look like in a hundred, a thousand(!) years. No-one can experience someone else’s consciousness. But if an artificial brain extension generated consciousness the same way we do and if it could be swapped between people safely. It might be the first time we have something saying, objectively, it has experienced being both of us in each of our brains and we see “red” the same way. The mind boggles…

Lightning trapped in sand etc. I used to play a kids game called Turing Tumble which shows how all logic operations can be replicated with little plastic seesaws and marbles. If you put the bits of plastic on the board in the right way you can see marbles falling by gravity performing binary addition. It blows my mind that that’s all that’s going on in my PC, just a trillion times the scale. I’ve worked in IT all my life and it continually surprises me that any of this stuff even works.

The sheer amount of information, feeling and emotion that happens to be conveyable by pressure waves in air. Can you imagine if sound just didn’t work? How much that would suck? It’s amazing that it’s like… a thing.

Sight too (obviously, now that we’re thinking this way). But just how fucking weird can a thing be if you manage to think about it abstractly for a minute? Matter, over there, just so happens to excite a completely unrelated field that randomly permeates everywhere, even empty space(?!). And we went and fucking evolved little squishy organs that connect these intangible excitations in this weird field into the glob of electrical neurons that make our being. And by some complete fucking voodoo I’m sat here with a picture in my mind of all matter around me that’s emitting EM radiation in the 400 to 790 trillion wobbles per second range. That’s weeiird.

Don’t forget that for centuries Christianity considered lending with interest to be a sin and so delegated it to Jews so they came to dominate banking and finance. By the 1100’s Jews were considered the ‘property of the king of England’ and we’re granted special rights such as free travel and having their legal testimony given more weight than Christians because they represented the king in financial matters.

Elevate an already hated minority to wealth and privilege as special servants of feudal power? What could go wrong?

It’s things like this that feel weirdly tragic; that our ancestors went through so much shit that only the ones with weird reflexes to grab their cranium made it. Young enough to have not had kids yet mind you. Other kids reacted in other ways, but they didn’t survive. And so here we are, grabbing our heads when our team doesn’t score, a chromosomal echo of some brutal day in the Kenyan Great Rift Valley…

Little people planet doesn’t sound like an improvement…