[FRIAM] death and dying (and disposal)

Mon Jan 20 10:45:56 EST 2025

morbid, a bit.
But, just think what 6 billion or so new trees over the next 100 years would do for climate change.
davew

On Sun, Jan 19, 2025, at 8:35 PM, steve smith wrote:
> DaveW -
> 
> morbid points:
> 
> For reasons I don't need to go into, I recently looked into death and disposal issues.
> 
>   I did determine that in fact I can legally be buried on my own private property with very limited constraints (distance from well, permanent habitation, dwell time before burial extended by ice or other refrigeration).   Much of the soil on my property is easy enough to dig... though by the time I expect to need it, I might not be able.  I think my hired labor (not to be deported since he and his wife got their permanent resident status last summer?) can dig that hole in an hour or two at most.   We already have 3 dogs and 3 cats (we know of)  buried here... why not a big ape also?
> 
> I still have a small pile of recycled flooring from Tesuque Village Market. It is soaked in the DNA of patrons and staff over the past many decades (I believe it might even be from the original flooring possibly in the 1920s or 1930s) which could make a suitable traditional wooden casket.  Some future forensic archeologist will be confounded to discover the spectrum of genetic material in my gravesite?   There are guidelines about marking such a grave and declaring it's presence to subsequent owners, but best I can tell those are very un-enforced (able?).    City (and maybe some Counties) rules are likely more strict, but I'm in the county and being embedded in native sovereign land (Pueblo), don't get much attention from County folks.  
> 
> I was once set on arranging an automated (counter-weight) lift platform in the giant cottonwood behind my house (50+ feet high) with a good view of Black Mesa where Ravens and Owls both sometimes nest for my "sky burial".  But it IS on native land and I doubt they would approve, much less agree to a viking being picked apart by Hugen and Munin whilst dessicating in the dry heat/cold.   Also, my neighbors already find me too much of a "hippy" and I think they might feel obliged to "tell on me"... not that I'd be there to care.
> 
> The last three people-bodies I sent into the furnace went in in cardboard caskets, and while I acknowledge the cremation oven/furnaces used *are* quite fuel-thirsty, I don't think it compares to what I'll burn in a single leg of a jet flight or a few months of ICE driving (my ER EV keeps me down to just a few gallons of dino-juice a month, the rest of the motive energy came from San Juan coal-fired plants, but now it is Natl Gas with Solar and Wind coming up fast).  I think my previous previous annual propane (only for oven/range) budget of about 20gallons would be enough to do the work?    
> 
> If only we had ice-floes around here... disposal by polar bear or orca is free and the ultimate sign of respect to the ecosystem?   I doubt a raft would even make it down the Rio Grande to Cochiti reservoir and some poor kayaker or hiker would have to deal with making sense of the find...   so maybe not that.
> 
> I do have a compost pile...  I haven't tried composting animal carcasses of any size, much less my own.
> 
> - Steve
> 
> 
> 
> On 1/19/25 11:45 AM, Prof David West wrote:
>> marginal point:
>> 
>> Should we not mandate NOR (natural organic reduction) for all human beings? Or, perhaps "sky burial" ala the Sikhs and some Native American cultures?
>> 
>> Save all the energy required for cremation and all of the environmentally unfriendly costs of caskets and concrete vaults that surround them.
>> 
>> Humans to compost to a carbon capturing tree.
>> 
>> Minnesota just legalized NOR.
>> 
>> davew
>> 
>> 
>> On Sun, Jan 19, 2025, at 11:47 AM, steve smith wrote:
>>> Jochen wrote:
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 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"
>>>> 
>>>> https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/446598/regeneration-by-hawken-paul/9780141998916
>>>> 
>>> it just so happens that I'm listening to a Nate Hagens podcast on the topic of bioregionalism <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e08dWgk-TRo&t=3283s> 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?
>>> 
>>> 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?). 
>>> 
>>> 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?
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 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. John says we need to achieve a steady state economic system.
>>>> 
>>>> https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/10501?srsltid=AfmBOopEymNyWKHnCaxz--HVIq0KJOayH5IYnOGfzHnri2zz6jeBMsEp
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> -J.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> -------- Original message --------
>>>> From: Santafe <desmith at santafe.edu>
>>>> Date: 1/19/25 12:04 PM (GMT+01:00)
>>>> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
>>>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fredkin/Toffoli, Reversibility and Adiabatic Computing.
>>>> 
>>>> 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)
>>>> 8dcc397c-a086-4abc-add0-ea3fa8f75082_1600x1224.png
>>>> 🔮 Breaking the energy barrier with reversible computing <https://www.exponentialview.co/p/reversible-computing-1>
>>>> exponentialview.co <https://www.exponentialview.co/p/reversible-computing-1>
>>>> about entropy.
>>>> 
>>>> 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?
>>>> 
>>>> Here are some old war-horses, never put out to pasture where they belong:
>>>> 
>>>> 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. 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> (my complaint is the parenthesis: entropy is not energy, usable or otherwise).  And later 
>>>> 
>>>> 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:
>>>> 
>>>> *Energy (in natural units) = Information (in nats)1 <https://www.exponentialview.co/p/reversible-computing-1#footnote-1-144839107>*
>>>> 
>>>> 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.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 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. 
>>>> 
>>>> The above are related to the writer (of the TechCrunch link?) saying that 
>>>> 
>>>>  Effectively, energy is retained inside the chip instead of being released as heat.
>>>> 
>>>> No.  There could be energy on the chip, but that’s not what the relation is about.
>>>> 
>>>> 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”.
>>>> 
>>>> 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).
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 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:
>>>> 
>>>> 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.
>>>> 
>>>> 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.
>>>> 
>>>> Eric
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>> On Jan 18, 2025, at 19:03, steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Pieter -
>>>>> 
>>>>> 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?  
>>>>> 
>>>>> https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/01/vaire-computing-raises-4-5m-for-reversible-computing-moonshot-which-could-drastically-reduce-energy-needs/
>>>>> 
>>>>> https://vaire.co/ <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fvaire.co%2f&c=E,1,7Yg6L5oMzyVTF9DuV3PSwOaj-V9Ifx9465R3NgRWVhnPUMCny23gFq_YnGVxv6ZGpVLLqMfg1QaQD1BjbgxIFv1SkxLkqM3VE-jtMwEi&typo=1>
>>>>> 
>>>>> 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... ). 
>>>>> 
>>>>> My inability to attribute such things, parallels that of LLMs (or more generally transformer models)?
>>>>> 
>>>>> - Steve
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