<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><title></title><style type="text/css">p.MsoNormal,p.MsoNoSpacing{margin:0}</style></head><body><div style="font-family:Arial;">marginal point:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">Should we not mandate NOR (natural organic reduction) for all human beings? Or, perhaps "sky burial" ala the Sikhs and some Native American cultures?<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">Save all the energy required for cremation and all of the environmentally unfriendly costs of caskets and concrete vaults that surround them.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">Humans to compost to a carbon capturing tree.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">Minnesota just legalized NOR.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">davew<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div>On Sun, Jan 19, 2025, at 11:47 AM, steve smith wrote:<br></div><blockquote type="cite" id="qt" style=""><p>Jochen wrote:<br></p><blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:202501191313.50JDD4IL033526@ame2.swcp.com"><p style="margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;" dir="ltr"><span style="color:var(--YLNNHc);background-color:rgb(255, 255, 255);"><span class="font" style="font-family:"Google Sans", Roboto-Medium, sans-serif;"></span></span><br></p><p style="margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;" dir="ltr"><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0);font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-variant-position:normal;vertical-align:baseline;"><span class="font" style="font-family:"Google Sans";">Natural
ecosystems do not consume more than they give back. Every
biological organism that dies is recycled and used to build
new organisms. If we want to integrate our society in this
only natural habitat which we have then fossil fuels must be
replaced by renewable energy, carbon dioxide emissions and
plastic waste production must be stopped, deforestation must
end, agriculture must be sustainable, resources must be
recycled. Paul Hawken mentions these steps in his book
"Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation"</span></span><br></p><p style="margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;" dir="ltr"><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0);font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-variant-position:normal;vertical-align:baseline;"><span class="font" style="font-family:"Google Sans";"><a class="qt-moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/446598/regeneration-by-hawken-paul/9780141998916">https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/446598/regeneration-by-hawken-paul/9780141998916</a></span></span><br></p></blockquote><p>it just so happens that I'm listening to a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e08dWgk-TRo&t=3283s">Nate
Hagens podcast on the topic of bioregionalism</a> which ties
(very abstractly) these points you are making here with my
experiments with Hashlife. The connection (if not too stretched)
is that the adaptation of a bioregion to human presence is
stigmergic and in the sense of hashlife is vaguely correlated with
the idea of building/maintaining a highly relevant/adaptive suite
of patterns in the environment suitable for the evolution of one
particular subsystem (human individuals, groups). One of the
participants in the panel is an archaelogist who studies
Neanderthal sites extensively who claimed there was a site she
studied extensively which was used as a large-mammal butchery for
roughly 200k years across various climactic shifts... did this
represent acute suitability or a stigmergic change in the locale
which resulted from the earliest uses of the locale?<br></p><p>The idea that "natural ecosystems do not consume more than they
give back" is an example, however, of my maunderings on the
"TANNSTAFFL" paradox. Circular/toroidal economies do seem to be
less wasteful (in some sense) but Life exists situated in
gradients and while it's signature trick is to export entropy from
it's immediate context, it *exports* it, not *avoids* it? It
seems as if this is all about defining "systems boundaries" which
of course may be a contradiction in terms (or a tautology?). <br></p><p>I don't know if this is a gibberishy as EricS' recent rant about
how bad science writing is bringing civilization to an early end
or not... but I do think it rhymes?<br></p><blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:202501191313.50JDD4IL033526@ame2.swcp.com"><div><br></div><p style="margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;" dir="ltr"><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0);font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-variant-position:normal;vertical-align:baseline;"><span class="font" style="font-family:"Google Sans";">But
it is more than just a climate crisis, it is "Civilization's
Crisis: A Set Of Linked Challenges" as the book from John
Scales Avery says. We have the interconnected challenges of
climate crisis, refugee crisis, energy scarcity, population
growth, resource depletion, poverty and economic inequality,
pollution and environmental degradation, and finally the
problem of war and nuclear weapons. Solving all these
interconnected crises in our capitalistic economic system
seems to be impossible. </span></span><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0);"><span class="font" style="font-family:"Google Sans";">John
says we need to achieve a steady state economic system.</span></span><br></p><p style="margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;" dir="ltr"><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0);font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-variant-position:normal;vertical-align:baseline;"><span class="font" style="font-family:"Google Sans";"><a class="qt-moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/10501?srsltid=AfmBOopEymNyWKHnCaxz--HVIq0KJOayH5IYnOGfzHnri2zz6jeBMsEp">https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/10501?srsltid=AfmBOopEymNyWKHnCaxz--HVIq0KJOayH5IYnOGfzHnri2zz6jeBMsEp</a></span></span><br></p><p style="margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;" dir="ltr"><span style="color:rgb(0, 0, 0);font-variant-numeric:normal;font-variant-east-asian:normal;font-variant-alternates:normal;font-variant-position:normal;vertical-align:baseline;"><span class="font" style="font-family:"Google Sans";"></span></span><br></p><p style="margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;" dir="ltr">-J.<br></p><p style="margin-top:0pt;margin-bottom:0pt;" dir="ltr"><br></p><div><br></div><div dir="auto" style="font-size:100%;color:rgb(0, 0, 0);" align="left"><div>-------- Original message --------<br></div><div>From: Santafe <a class="qt-moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:desmith@santafe.edu"><desmith@santafe.edu></a><br></div><div>Date: 1/19/25 12:04 PM (GMT+01:00)<br></div><div>To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <a class="qt-moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:friam@redfish.com"><friam@redfish.com></a><br></div><div>Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fredkin/Toffoli, Reversibility and
Adiabatic Computing.<br></div><div><br></div></div><div>I think Jochen is right, that civilization will collapse. And the
reason is that people keep writing articles like this one (a
couple of clicks deep from Steve’s TechCrunch link)<br></div><div><div style="display:block;"><div role="link" class="qt-apple-rich-link" style="display:inline-block;"><table class="qt-lp-rich-link-emailBaseTable" style="table-layout:fixed;border-collapse:collapse;width:300px;background-color:rgb(229, 230, 233);font-family:-apple-system, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;" width="300" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0"><tbody><tr><td align="center"><img src="cid:part1.4O9C0WfK.lrCoc2YD@swcp.com" alt="8dcc397c-a086-4abc-add0-ea3fa8f75082_1600x1224.png" class="qt-lp-rich-link-mediaImage" style="width:300px;height:150px;" width="300" height="150"><br></td></tr><tr><td><table class="qt-lp-rich-link-captionBar" style="font-family:-apple-system, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;table-layout:fixed;background-color:rgb(229, 230, 233);" width="300" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" bgcolor="#E5E6E9"><tbody><tr><td class="qt-lp-rich-link-captionBar-textStackItem" style="padding-top:8px;padding-right:0px;padding-bottom:8px;padding-left:0px;"><div class="qt-lp-rich-link-captionBar-textStack" style="max-width:100%;margin-top:0px;margin-right:16px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:16px;overflow-x:hidden;overflow-y:hidden;"><div class="qt-lp-rich-link-captionBar-textStack-topCaption-leading" style="overflow-wrap:break-word;font-weight:500;font-size:12px;overflow-x:hidden;overflow-y:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;text-align:left;"><a style="text-decoration-color:currentcolor;text-decoration-line:none;text-decoration-style:solid;text-decoration-thickness:auto;" href="https://www.exponentialview.co/p/reversible-computing-1" rel="nofollow"><span class="color" style="color:rgb(39, 39, 39);">🔮 Breaking the
energy barrier with reversible
computing</span></a><br></div><div class="qt-lp-rich-link-captionBar-textStack-bottomCaption-leading" style="overflow-wrap:break-word;font-weight:400;font-size:11px;overflow-x:hidden;overflow-y:hidden;text-overflow:ellipsis;text-align:left;"><a style="text-decoration-color:currentcolor;text-decoration-line:none;text-decoration-style:solid;text-decoration-thickness:auto;" href="https://www.exponentialview.co/p/reversible-computing-1" rel="nofollow"><span class="color" style="color:rgb(128, 128, 128);">exponentialview.co</span></a><br></div></div></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></div></div><div>about entropy.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Like Charles de Gaulle’s (apocryphal?) “How can you govern
a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?”, how can a
society continue that is committed to making entropy into
voodoo?<br></div><div><br></div><div>Here are some old war-horses, never put out to pasture
where they belong:<br></div><div><br></div><div><p style="line-height:1.6em;color:rgb(54, 55, 55);font-family:Spectral, serif, system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol";font-size:19px;">The
law that this potential reduction in energy all depends on
is the second law of thermodynamics, which states that
entropy (unusable energy or disorder) increases over time.
As a result, everything ultimately runs down and releases
waste heat. <br></p><div><br></div></div><div>(my complaint is the parenthesis: entropy is not energy,
usable or otherwise). And later <br></div><div><br></div><div><p style="line-height:1.6em;color:rgb(54, 55, 55);font-family:Spectral, serif, system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol";font-size:19px;">Landauer
created a formula for the energy in joules released per
binary bit deleted. If we express his original equation in
natural units of energy and information, the equation is
astoundingly simple:<br></p><p style="line-height:1.6em;color:rgb(54, 55, 55);font-family:Spectral, serif, system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol";font-size:19px;"><i style=""><span style="">Energy
(in natural units) = Information (in nats)</span><a style="color:var(--print_pop);text-decoration-color:currentcolor;text-decoration-line:none;text-decoration-style:solid;text-decoration-thickness:auto;vertical-align:super;line-height:0;font-size:14px;margin-left:4px;" rel="" href="https://www.exponentialview.co/p/reversible-computing-1#footnote-1-144839107" id="qt-footnote-anchor-1-144839107" class="qt-footnote-anchor">1</a></i><br></p><p style="line-height:1.6em;color:rgb(54, 55, 55);font-family:Spectral, serif, system-ui, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, "Apple Color Emoji", "Segoe UI Emoji", "Segoe UI Symbol";font-size:19px;">Now,
this doesn’t prove that energy and information are
equivalent in the same way that Einstein proved that mass
and energy were equivalent, but it is a tantalising
possibility.<br></p></div><div><br></div><div>It’s not a tantalizing possibility. It’s a meaningless
nonsense-locution that you say to people if you don’t think
they could understand a correct description and don’t really
care anyway. <br></div><div><br></div><div>The above are related to the writer (of the TechCrunch
link?) saying that <br></div><div><br></div><div><span style="color:rgb(33, 38, 35);"><span class="font" style="font-family:nb_international_proregular, sans-serif;"><span class="size" style="font-size:19px;"> Effectively,
energy is retained inside the chip instead of being released
as heat.</span></span></span><br></div><div><br></div><div>No. There could be energy on the chip, but that’s not what
the relation is about.<br></div><div><br></div><div>What is retained in the chip is specificity among choices.
Whether or not there is any energy difference in one choice
versus another has nothing to do with anything’s being
“retained inside the chip”.<br></div><div><br></div><div>The reason Landauer’s relation (in any of its variants)
holds is that, to recycle chip-state, you have to have a way
to rotate the state-entropy out into a thermal bath. More
specifically, there has to be a way to rotate any state from
the chip into some corresponding state in the bath such that
the chip is returned to a default state to receive the next
inputs. Because the signal state that you are rotating out
could be any allowed one, the bath-state that you need to
rotate it into needs likewise to be one from an ensemble. It
is to make the _bath states_ populatable that you need to
supply entropy-less energy (aka work), which the bath then
moves into no-longer-controlled degrees of freedom (aka heat).<br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>I’m not actually up on a high horse, and write as if I were
mostly to make myself absurd. I really don’t care one way or
another. But there is a thing in here about being real to
people that seems important to me as a theoretician, as it has
to do with envisioning a different world. Increasingly I have
some time with Sci-Com people, and they are remarkably
un-bothered by the thing that, to me, seems like the core of
all later choices:<br></div><div><br></div><div>What if, when we talked to people, we either tried to give
our best ability to be understood, or like Quakers, we just
stayed quiet. The motive being that, if we aren’t giving them
something we intend them to understand, then we must be doing
something else. Hoping we make ourselves look smart?
Fashionable? That feels icky (dishonorable) to me, in the
attitude one person evidently has about others. They are
there to fuel vanity; not as peers who deserve knowledge if
your guild is the knowledge workers.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Sure, we all mess up. But our society now is structured
around relations where I think people really don’t care, and
this casual clowning is taken to be the default, and all fine.
It makes me uncomfortable.<br></div><div><br></div><div>Eric<br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div>On Jan 18, 2025, at 19:03, steve smith <a class="qt-moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:sasmyth@swcp.com"><sasmyth@swcp.com></a> wrote:<br></div><div><br></div><div><div><p>Pieter -<br></p><p>Good find. It lead me to Vaire and then to the
Sandia/ABQ work of Michael Frank who left to
join/found Vaire this summer? It is possible that my
renewed interest in reversible computing might have
been triggered subliminally by some reference to
both/either? <br></p><p><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/01/vaire-computing-raises-4-5m-for-reversible-computing-moonshot-which-could-drastically-reduce-energy-needs/">https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/01/vaire-computing-raises-4-5m-for-reversible-computing-moonshot-which-could-drastically-reduce-energy-needs/</a><br></p><p><a class="qt-moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fvaire.co%2f&c=E,1,7Yg6L5oMzyVTF9DuV3PSwOaj-V9Ifx9465R3NgRWVhnPUMCny23gFq_YnGVxv6ZGpVLLqMfg1QaQD1BjbgxIFv1SkxLkqM3VE-jtMwEi&typo=1">https://vaire.co/</a><br></p><p>I thought I'd been triggered by the combination of
the demands of AI and on data centers (my daughter
closed her gym of 10 years to take a job in a data
center development startup a year ago... ). <br></p><p>My inability to attribute such things, parallels that
of LLMs (or more generally transformer models)?<br></p><div>- Steve<br></div></div><div>.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .--
.-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-.
..- .-..<br></div><div> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv<br></div><div> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays
9a-12p Zoom <a class="qt-moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,CdxDQvGK-EwZVy4Dh62Vr88_4rI_EeQWk8wvgy62aA8L0A7FBsriIuHGBqMsVGQyV0IBNnoqtdsLYieD2wpFmUMkKpYo8DdJq6AWby4566tlvg,,&typo=1">https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fbit.ly%2fvirtualfriam&c=E,1,CdxDQvGK-EwZVy4Dh62Vr88_4rI_EeQWk8wvgy62aA8L0A7FBsriIuHGBqMsVGQyV0IBNnoqtdsLYieD2wpFmUMkKpYo8DdJq6AWby4566tlvg,,&typo=1</a><br></div><div> to (un)subscribe <a class="qt-moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,dxFGOafzQM2h2pCg07W8FhQOr3T7S6BUm7gwtCPkDguTqF6XDUnZ5a0u4UYzFZljhUAEbDA2ZVBxmTD75y6e20lVL-FmtU0vI8XhxmecpHB-YXZT&typo=1">https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fmailman%2flistinfo%2ffriam_redfish.com&c=E,1,dxFGOafzQM2h2pCg07W8FhQOr3T7S6BUm7gwtCPkDguTqF6XDUnZ5a0u4UYzFZljhUAEbDA2ZVBxmTD75y6e20lVL-FmtU0vI8XhxmecpHB-YXZT&typo=1</a><br></div><div> FRIAM-COMIC <a class="qt-moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,9J5kJ4jNpb5WTH8P4MqcAUphyz2P5njBVf96n2ZrV3snQ_mMwks3ITyxVH9M644mn8f-TDW6ogLbbOkSK6tcbqti4wt7x7g14BYzAyNXveyXWZfJkNT1uta375j8&typo=1">https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=http%3a%2f%2ffriam-comic.blogspot.com%2f&c=E,1,9J5kJ4jNpb5WTH8P4MqcAUphyz2P5njBVf96n2ZrV3snQ_mMwks3ITyxVH9M644mn8f-TDW6ogLbbOkSK6tcbqti4wt7x7g14BYzAyNXveyXWZfJkNT1uta375j8&typo=1</a><br></div><div> archives: 5/2017 thru present <a class="qt-moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fpipermail%2ffriam_redfish.com%2f&c=E,1,8-rTJlMb4CPIKKvzolJDIVhjM6u2RCZGNTcSIn92ODKcto1bVHyxx5NDYzCJtHBMP-wyInKPSZRvhlZhomwdlCJbVw4MOnpDztar40RC&typo=1">https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fredfish.com%2fpipermail%2ffriam_redfish.com%2f&c=E,1,8-rTJlMb4CPIKKvzolJDIVhjM6u2RCZGNTcSIn92ODKcto1bVHyxx5NDYzCJtHBMP-wyInKPSZRvhlZhomwdlCJbVw4MOnpDztar40RC&typo=1</a><br></div><div> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 <a class="qt-moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/">http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/</a><br></div></div></blockquote></div><div><br></div></div><div><br></div><pre class="qt-moz-quote-pre">.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom <a class="qt-moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://bit.ly/virtualfriam">https://bit.ly/virtualfriam</a>
to (un)subscribe <a class="qt-moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com">http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com</a>
FRIAM-COMIC <a class="qt-moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/">http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/</a>
archives: 5/2017 thru present <a class="qt-moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/">https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/</a>
1/2003 thru 6/2021 <a class="qt-moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/">http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/</a>
<br></pre></blockquote><div>.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..<br></div><div>FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv<br></div><div>Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom <a href="https://bit.ly/virtualfriam">https://bit.ly/virtualfriam</a><br></div><div>to (un)subscribe <a href="http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com">http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com</a><br></div><div>FRIAM-COMIC <a href="http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/">http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/</a><br></div><div>archives: 5/2017 thru present <a href="https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/">https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/</a><br></div><div> 1/2003 thru 6/2021 <a href="http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/">http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/</a><br></div><div><br></div></blockquote><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div></body></html>