Wandering Adventure Party

I don’t blame the orcas - have you seen a human? Those things are, like, 1/3 of the size of an orca; they’re clearly malnourished, some good ol’ seal meat will fix’em up real good!

Serious now. I think it’s interesting how they’re interacting cooperatively, with an animal of a different species. And it isn’t like either side domesticated the other (unlike, say, humans vs. dogs and cats); they don’t even live in the same environments, at most you have some humans doing short trips into the sea and that’s it.

“What I think in a sense is more impressive is that humans basically give no credit to any other creature for having a mind,” Safina said. Yet many other creatures, including orcas, understand implicitly that humans have minds. “So they understand us, and give us more credit there, they seem to comprehend the world better than we do, in our self-imposed estrangement.”

I feel like this is a step beyond theory of mind already.

Hyde says that the problem is that, although scientific facts are taught at school, the facts “about” science are not taught well enough.

Bingo. They do a poor job teaching people:

• That failures are not only expected, but welcome; they’ll guide future successes.
• That conflicts of interest do happen, and peer reviewing is a way to address them.
• That the current leading theory on something is simply the current best explanation, not some immutable truth.
• That science doesn’t say “trust me”; it shows you the data, and asks you to find a better way to explain it.

We (people all around the world, I think?) also do a poor job at teaching ourselves basic rationality:

• That you should get suspicious of any institution or group that only shows the good parts - they’re likely hiding shit.
• Why “trust me” is an insult towards the hearer’s intelligence.
• Why people shouldn’t vomit certainty on things they cannot reliably know.

Solanum is the tsundere genus - half of the species want to feed you, the other half to kill you.

On a more serious note:

The researchers found that each ancestral parent contained one key gene that—when combined—allowed tubers to grow. Tomatoes contributed the SP6A gene, which acts like a master switch to begin tuber formation. And from the Etuberosum side, another gene called IT1 controls the growth of stems that become tubers.

I did some websearch to check what the SP6A gene does in tomatoes, apparently the SP stands for self-pruning; it probably tells the plant to stop growing an appendage. I couldn’t find much info on the IT1 gene from Solanum etuberosum, but if I had to guess it tells the plant to dump carbs in the rhizomes.

If that’s correct, IT1 makes the plant keep pumping carbs into rhizomes for further growth, then SP6A says the growth is over, the carbs accumulate and you get a tuber.

If the hybrid population is fertile, it has at least as much survival fitness as the “best” of the parents. But probably more because it can couple advantageous traits from both for that environment.

So, in this case, it’s better to be pessimistic: they’ll be probably fast breeders, massive colony makers and rapid spreaders, since all those traits would help them to spread further.

Last time I heard about reverse osmosis it was about water purification, exploiting that water molecules are tiny and ions + organic molecules are bulky. I’m glad to see the tech finding its way into other processes though - specially oil refining, the current solution (fractional distillation) is basically “use lots of energy to boil it, then use even more energy to condensate it”.

They achieve this using membranes produced by interfacial polymerisation. This technique, which traditionally involves dissolving the two monomers – one in water and one in an organic solvent – to form a crosslinked polymer at the interface, is therefore highly attractive for scalable production of hydrocarbon-separation membranes.

That’s quite smart.

I’m aware some energy is recycled, and I do think we (humankind as a whole) need to phase fossil fuels out. But even then, we’ll still need petrochemicals - and I’m hoping this sort of membrane eventually makes them cheaper, when used instead or alongside fractioning columns.

Hydrogen from syngas (thus ammonia), sulphur (thus sulphuric acid), ethylene, benzene, and so many others, they’re used for absolutely everything: fertilisers, medication, explosives, solvents, detergent, dyes. Even a good chunk of the industrial ethanol comes from ethylene.

And as you hinted, plastics. We still need them for water tubes, computers, and everything else.

So even in a future where we stop doing stupid shit like literally burning old dino juice, and we reduce the amount of plastics to reasonable levels, we’re still going to need petrochemicals.

I hope this research leads to the replacement of some oil-based polymers. And, additionally, I think we should decrease our reliance on industrial polymers, my balls already have enough microplastics; even if they come from a cleaner source, their presence in nature is problematic.