Decibel #19
Some things from around the internet I consumed this week and found interesting:
- Ozone Layer is healing (News article + scientific review paper)
- DIY fancy hue home lighting blogpost (DIY blogpost)
- In The Long Run, We’re All Dad (essay on fatherhood)
1. Ozone Layer Update
TCO [Total column ozone] is expected to return to 1980 values around 2066 in the Antarctic, around 2045 in the Arctic, and around 2040 for the near-global average (60°N–60°S).
It’s exciting to see real improvements when humanity groups together to fix a problem.
2. Home Lighting
I’ve been interested in improving the quality of the light in my house. The simplest improvement has been finding high CRI, bright, and silent LED light bulbs and using them in most places. Some rooms need more accent or specialized lighting, and I decided to try some of the (way too expensive) Phillips Hue lights.
Unfortunately I love them. It’s unfortunate because they’re way too expensive. The colors and brightness are great, the automations smooth, but the experience watching your bank account if you were to fill your house with these would be… draining.
So what if a little tinkering and a little soldering and a waiting a few weeks for shipping from China could yield something just as good? And that’s how I came across this nice writeup of someone exploring the same questions I want to answer. If you like DIY blogs I recommend giving it at least a glancing read.
3. In The Long Run, We’re All Dad
I haven’t laughed out loud like this while reading in a while. I strongly recommend a read.
It has a juxtaposition in tone and story that delights me. It tickled my appreciation for real human experience paired with absurdism. It takes the very Human story of becoming a father and writes about it with a mix of robot and heart that touched me.
In February 2023 I found myself sitting in the waiting room of a San Francisco fertility clinic, holding a cup of my own semen.
The Bible tells the story of Onan, son of Judah. Onan’s brother died. Tradition dictated that Onan should impregnate his brother’s wife, ensuring that his brother’s line would (in some sense) live on. Onan refused, instead “spilling the seed on the ground”. God smote Onan, starting a 4,000-year-old tradition of religious people getting angry about wasting sperm on anything other than procreative sex.
HAHAHA. The juxtaposition of modern fertility clinic imagery and old Biblical imagery amuses me greatly.
We did manage to avoid the hospital, but [morning sickness] was rough. I’m surprised more people don’t name their children after Zofran®. Women get such positive feelings about it, right when they’re considering baby names. For a girl, you could nickname her Zoe. For a boy, Frank.
Hhahahaha. If I didn’t know better I could definitely see Zofran as a name.
On December 13, 2023, two surprisal-minimization engines registered an unprecedented spike in surprisal. They were thrust from a sunless sea into a blooming buzzing confusion, flooded with inexplicable data through input channels they didn’t even know they had.
I love describing the twins as surprisal-minimization engines, then following it with descriptions of them as computer engines computing the world… until they realized they could cry. Very poetic and heart warming.
My poor, fragile, little cognitive engines! These, then, will be the twin imperatives of your life: surprisal minimization and active inference. If your brains are still too small to process such esoteric terms, there are others available. Your father’s ancestors called them Torah and tikkun olam; your mother’s ancestors called them Truth and Beauty; your current social sphere calls them Rationality and Effective Altruism. You will learn other names, too: no perspective can exhaust their infinite complexity. Whatever you call them, your lives will be spent in their service, pursuing them even unto that far-off and maybe-mythical point where they blur into One.
The awareness of the different lenses of the biological brain as of science, of god, of nature, and of modernity (and maybe a singularity) appeals to me.
There is a secret known only to parents of twins, medical residents, and Alexey Guzey: the human body does not actually need sleep. After 31 hours awake, you get an integer overflow in God’s database and go back to being well-rested again. Also you gain the ability to see angels.
ahhahahahah. The continued connection between religious and computer references amuses me greatly.
The Snoo is a $1500 computerized bassinet that continually assesses babies’ needs and tries to calm them with various soothing noises and automated rocking motions. We got two, both of which have been soundly rejected. The twins insist on sleeping in their carseats, which we’ve grudgingly moved to the nursery. At first I was miffed, but now I see their logic. You’ve got to learn to resist the algorithmic content mills early.
AHAHAHAHA. “You’ve got to learn to resist the algorithmic content mills early.” So true. So true.
> Lyra is already an overachiever. She has clearly read all the How To Be A Baby textbooks, learned when crying is appropriate, and only cries at those specific times. She drinks the exact amount of milk recommended on the Baby Age-Appropriate Nursing Chart, then refuses to accept more. I’m worried that if we don’t teach her to think independently soon, she’ll end up somewhere terrible like Harvard.
Hahaha shots fired! Pew pew pew!
Until next time.
-Alex