[FRIAM] death and dying (and disposal)
Frank Wimberly
wimberly3 at gmail.com
Mon Jan 20 10:51:24 EST 2025
My father was a Naval officer during WW2. I suspect he had friends who had
been buried at sea. It appeals to me to be taken out in the ocean and
dropped overboard (with weights).
---
Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505
505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM
On Mon, Jan 20, 2025, 8:35 AM Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> 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> <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>
> <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)
> [image: 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>
> <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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