Interesting Links for 27-11-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Transporting liquid hydrogen is never going to be effective

(tags:hydrogen energy storage viaDanielDWilliam )

2. Photochemistry happening in an exoplanet - found for the first time!

(tags:space planets chemistry light )

3. It amuses me no end how much people can't understand that different people have fundamentally different experiences

(tags:imagination vision psychology brain experience )

4. How is the China chip embargo going?

(tags:China USA trade Doom technology processor cpu computers )

5. Half of Twitter's top advertisers have left the social media platform

(tags:Twitter advertising )

Comments

[nancylebov]

3. I'm thinking of writing something pretty savage for ACX about people who don't realize that experiences vary. Oh, no, it can't be true. Everyone can enjoy exercise! I know the perfect diet!


I will presumably tone down the savagery, but it's a strain to see people who just don't hear it when they're told clearly that their perfect idea of how other people should live isn't generally applicable.

[andrewducker]

See also "Everyone is poly deep down" and "sexuality is a choice".

[nancylebov]

I supposed I should invite added examples.

[andrewducker]

Let me know when you've written it!

[bugshaw]

We're all a little bit on the spectrum!

[nancylebov]

See also "No one can make poly work" and "There are no real atheists".

[andrewducker]

Also awful.

[lilysea]

A few years before COVID existed, I used to wear an N95 Vogmask on trains because otherwise people's body spray/spray on deoderant/perfume gave me migraines that could last for 1 to 3 days.

Someone who I had known for many years saw me at the train station wearing the mask and got really weirded out by it - she was acting like I was Howard Hughes.

I explained that perfume/strongly scented spray on deoderants gave me migraines

and she said "Well perfumes don't give ME" migraines, in a tone of voice that implied that if she didn't experience something, no one experienced that thing.

I snarkily said to someone else later "Does she go up to people who are allergic to peanuts and say 'Well I'M not allergic to peanuts' in a tone of voice that implies that all peanut allergies are fake because she personally does not have a peanut allergy?"

[nancylebov]

It's possible, or at least I see people complaining about fake allergies.

[dewline]

I am finding more and more reasons to stay masked post-Pandemic.

This may be another one to add to the list.

[armiphlage]

I usually suffer from seasonal allergies.

Since I started masking, I haven't.

[hairyears]

There are actually people like that.

They are incredibly dangerous to children and the ones who work in schools are only dissuaded from feeding alkergen-contaminated foods to children by fear of disciplinary sanctions which they resent as an arbitrary and unreasonable restriction with no basis in fact.

See, also, people who don't believe mental illness is 'real': an offensive idea at the best of times and very damaging when they gravitate to public policy and HR positions.

[calimac]

3) None of the above; my platonic apple is green. Also, I don't imagine a black silhouette of a head.

[channelpenguin]

I'm not sure I have real images, but I have the mental tag of a coloured pencil sketch I did of a red-green apple in 2005 when I realised it had been about 10yrs since I'd drawn anything and wondered if I still could (yes, I could).

I can hear music in my head. I mean not CAN, DO. Like most of the time. Some existing, some not. In varying levels of detail.

I've never doubted peoples experiences are different. The ones that weirded me out were those where people don't "inhabit" their body, or not as fully as I seem to. Like the lady who did an isolation float tank and commented about then feeling and hearing her ribs expand when she breathed and other things. Or that most people don't notice themselves blinking. I was taken aback that anyone could be so disconnected from their body (I AM my body in a very very real and tangible way), but never doubted that their experience was true! It actually explained things about others that I'd found puzzling.

(I'm also envious of those with BETTER body awareness than me - singers that can reliably feel a correct note without being able to hear it, athletes that know very precisely which muscles they are using...)

[hairyears]

Mine has a sharp 'crunch!' and that lovely lemony tang you get on apples fresh off the tree, picked a little earlier than the commercial expectations of 'ripe'.

The colour and the texture of the skin are there, and very detailed in my mind, but they vary: lat year it was very "Cox's Orange Pippin" but, right now, 'Apple' has a perfect crayon-green apple colour, the shape of a table-grade Granny Smith, and the slightly disagreeable mouth feel of a supermarket's display apple that's been over-waxed to boost its shelf life.

The skin is slightly sharp and I am worried that it'll cut my gums.


And that's a sensation I can feel, faintly, when I see the inner label 'apple'.

It hurts my gum, between two molars on my right, when I pull out the 'catalog card' and retrieve the full sensory experience of 'apple'.

Which is to say: I could tick a box at '1' to say that yes, I see a picture of an apple when I read "Apple" but...

There's so much more. It isn't truthful to say that I have 'visual memory', because that apple picture in my head is just the jpeg on a much, much richer 'catalogue card' that I pick out as a *concise* label for the full experience of 'apple'.

[armiphlage]

From a link in 1., "Japan is hanging its entire decarbonisation strategy on clean ammonia imports. OK it can't import power via HVDC,"

Kitakyushu to Busan is only about 220 km, with a maximum depth of 227 m. The North Sea Link between Norway and the UK is 720 km, with a maximum depth of 700 m. So importing LH2 is definitely not needed.

[hairyears]

It's Japan: corruption-driven policy, at a level so deep that that they exchange far more than money.

[hairyears]

3: The discussions of face-blindness on that sensory-visualisation thread are *fascinating*.

...And I have skin in the game here, with a cluster of dyslexia-adjacent deficits that I work very hard indeed to conceal in my social and professional life. There's no sympathy and no desire whatsoever to make practical and and emotional accommodations: at a very, very deep level, nobody will ever forgive you for forgetting their face, even if they have sufficient kindness to formulate a verbal reassurance that they do not mind.




Just to be clear, I am by definition not-dyslexic: I have no reading deficit at all.

[andrewducker]

My father is a voracious reader. And terribly dyslexic, in that he absolutely cannot spell. Which didn't stop him becoming a doctor, in the 1960s, which I am quite impressed by!

(He also can't tell left from right without stopping to think for 5 seconds.)

[hairyears]

1: Hydrogen is dangerous, and nobody who actually works with it is happy with the idea of it in widespread use.

Not for widespread 'consumer' use; and not, as we see in this latest lunacy, widespread in the sense of 'enough to power a city' quantities, either.

The former is about lots of people being injured (mostly: dying, because hydrogen explosions are never minor) and significantly increased spending on fire and rescue services.

The latter could be reframed as: 'enough to level a city'.

Hydrogen is dangerous: never have a discussion about using Hydrogen, with lay people prese, without saying:

Hydrogen is dangerous.

These ideas must NOT gain traction.

[nojay]

Time was here in the UK we loved hydrogen as an energy source so much that we used to pipe it into every home, school, hospital and office. Gas used for cooking and heating was made from the incomplete combustion of coal resulting in a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. When "natural" gas (aka methane) was found in the North Sea in copious quantities we changed over to that as our preferred gas energy source.

[snippy]

3. I see the word "apple." But also, don't any of them have siblings? My sister's tales of our childhood diverge massively from mine, and she's less than 2 years younger!