Why Aluminum Doesn’t Burn…and the Aluminum Twins

Aluminum doesn’t burn because it is a metal with a melting point of 1,220.40 degrees Fahrenheit (660.3 Celsius) at Standard Pressure. What gives aluminum such a high melting point is the structural nature of its molecules. Molecules with strong bonds require more energy to break and aluminum has strong, covalent bonds*. Covalent bonds are chemical bonds which involve the sharing of electrons between atoms to form electron pairs. These pairs of electrons, or shared pairs/bonding pairs, allow each atom to attain the equivalent of a “full valence shell,” which corresponds to a stable electronic configuration. Stable electron configuration = you can put your leftover quiche on a strip of aluminum foil in the oven without causing a fiery explosion:

Aluminum is the world’s most abundant metal, making up about 8.2% of the Earth’s crust. This helps explains why the cost of the metal is so low when compared to other, less-common metals. But this low cost is a relatively recent/post 1860s phenomenon. Aluminum is never found in a pure state in nature, it is always mixed with other elements, in compounds like alum and aluminum oxide.

Alum/new rock from your local crystal dealer
Aluminum oxide/bumpy dirt

For years aluminum was expensive because humans hadn’t mastered the refining process yet.

To obtain aluminum today, humans first mine the substance bauxite, the basic raw material from which most of aluminum is produced.

Bauxite…contains more than 50% aluminum oxide…looks a bit like a cow’s kneecap
A bauxite-extraction “Surface Miner” machine in Guinea / Machine #492 from the Dune series, described in Appendix xxii – vxii

Bauxite was named after the French castle Les Baux, in Provence, where it was first discovered. Here’s a photo from Les Baux in December of 2019:

Provence pretty af

During the refining process bauxite is crushed, mixed in a sodium hydroxide solution, then the impurities are taken away through filtration and settling, which leaves us with alumina.

Alumina. Used by the Illuminati as fake cocaine since 1797.

The alumina is then dissolved by heating it via pressurized steam.

When Aluminum was first discovered in the late 1700s, it was considered a precious metal and was worth more than gold. It was considered so valuable that when the Washington Monument in Washington D.C. was first built between 1848 and 1884 (starting and stopping for 36 years due to lack of funds, bloody Civil War, etc.), the U.S. government wanted to have a precious metal cap, and chose aluminum (at this point the price of aluminum was about the same price as silver, $1.10 an ounce).

The Monument in 1860, year 12 of construction

They hired William Frishmuth of Philadelphia, a German chemist who had emigrated to the U.S. and who had worked as a secret agent for the War Department at a request from Abraham Lincoln, for the commission of creating the monument’s apex. The Washington Monument would be the tallest structure in the world for five years between 1884 and 1889, before being overtaken by the Eiffel Tower.

Someday this triangle is going to be worth $.06754 an ounce, 1,628x less than it’s worth today!

Frismuth had spent 28 years and $53,000 of his own money ($1.6 million today) experimenting with the refinement of aluminum. The process that he had created was to heat the ore until the alumina vaporized, then add sodium vapor. When he created the tip of the Washington monument, it was the largest piece of aluminum cast up until that time, at 8 inches tall. Cost = $225 ($7,000 today).

The aluminum pyramid itself was only 22.6 cm in height, 13.9 cm at its base, and weighed 2.85 kg. In this photo, the photographer Theodore Horydczak admires the “jewel-like” aluminum pyramid, which is now worth (novelty of being the monument cap aside) $5.88 based on current aluminum prices.

Less than two years after the completion of the Washington Monument, Charles Martin Hall (a recent graduate of Oberlin College, Ohio), discovered a process for making aluminum common and cheap…so cheap that Aluminum would replace iron as the #1 most widely-used metal by humans, which iron had held uncontested since it’s prehistoric discovery 5,000 years prior.

Charles (after numerous experiments in a homemade coal-fired furnace and bellows in a shed behind his family home) dissolved alumina in a molten cryolite bath, then ran electricity through the mixture for 2 hours. He was left with a puddle of aluminum in the bottom of the “retort”/container in which substances are heated at high temperatures. Success. In 1886 he filed a patent on the following reaction:

For two years he couldn’t get financial support at home so in 1888 he went to Pittsburg and founded the Pittsburg Reduction Company with $20,000. The process he created would reduce the price of aluminum by a factor of 200. He’d go on to make a fortune of $27 million. The Reduction Company later became the Aluminum Company of America, then Alcoa, which is a company that earned $12.152 billion in revenue last year.

Charles Hall: “I also put electricity through my hair to achieve this perfect part.”

At the same time a young Frenchman named Paul Heroult who was the exact same age as Charles Hall (22) was working on the same, refining process. He succeeded with it two months after Hall.

Paul Heroult: “Vous avez peut-être découvert le processus de raffinage de l’aluminium deux mois avant moi, arrogant Américain avec des yeux tristes et jolis, mais au moins je sais cuisiner et faire l’amour aux femmes !

At the age of 15 they had both read the same “famous” book on aluminum by Henri Sainte-Claire Deville, De l’aluminium. Ses propriétés, sa fabrication et ses applications. Heroult would also patent his discovery the same year (1886) and set up his process at an industrial scale, creating the SEMF/Société Électro-Métallurgique Française. Despite these parallels, they were polar opposites in personalities. While Charles was quiet, obedient, and studious Héroult was “sent to a series of boarding schools, possibly in part to tame his rebelliousness.” Christian Bickert of the Pechiny corporation, a major aluminum conglomerate based in France, described Paul:

“Paul Héroult had none of the attributes of the traditional scholar. He was highstrung, unruly, occasionally hard and insolent; he did not fit the image of wise, disciplined men of science. He loved games, the company of women, travels by land and sea; he was a free spirit in an impetuous body. No comparison with the austere scientist, struggling with stubborn mysteries. His discoveries were not the result of long sleepless nights spent in a laboratory, or of complicated scientific demonstrations. Héroult loved life, and could not have borne such restrictions. Instead, his inventions appeared suddenly, out of the blue, a stroke of common sense, or of genius, sometimes during a lively game of billiards, his favorite pastime.”

Due to the close timing of Hall and Heroult’s discoveries the process is now known as the Hall-Héroult process, the major industrial process for smelting aluminum. They would both die the same year, at the age of 51 in the year 1914. Hall was unmarried and childless, and left most of his fortune to charity. Heroult left behind a son named Paul, billiard tables, and a 35 meter yacht named Samva.

But wait…how does aluminum become aluminum foil? Here:

Anybody wanna go halfsies on a $90,000 Aluminum Foil Container Making Machine?

The French wikipedia page on Paul Héroult is considered the oldest French article on the website, dated May 19, 2001.

Thank you, Aluminum twins, brothers across cultures, countries, and character…for your contribution that has echoed across a century, a contribution that has formed an essential foundation to the manufacturing edifice that quietly supports our modern habits, responsible for necessary goods such as airplane parts, beer kegs, window frames, kitchen utensils, cans, roofing, insulation, electronic devices, guttering, skyscrapers, flat screen TVs, mirrors, coffee machines, tablet PCs, bridges, the outer cases of cell phones, and doors…the potential technologies and worlds we build will forever pay homage to your discovered method of extraction.

*(Bonds can break because of increased heat/increased energy flow…solids become liquids become gasses become plasma. Neon signs and lightning = plasma/most abundant form of ordinary matter in the universe.)

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Sources:

www.sciencehistory.org

www.cairn.info

www.sciencedirect.com

https://sciencing.com/what-abundant-metal-earth-4587197.html

kloecknermetals.com

nps.gov

www.steelabservices.com

How To Take Down The Internet

4 minute read

Traduction française ci-dessous

All the computers that form the internet are identified through long numbers called IP addresses. But when you want to visit a place like Twitter, you don’t want to type in, “199.59.148.0,” (which is one of the IP addresses of one of the servers that host Twitter), but rather www.Twitter.com.

This means that your computer needs to translate www.Twitter.com into the right IP address. So your computer makes a series of requests: it asks your operating system where to go (in this case let’s say it doesn’t “know”), then a recursive name server (nope, doesn’t know either), then the world’s 13 root servers (yes!) which sends you to the appropriate top-level domain server, the one that runs all the “.coms,” who sends you to the correct authoritative name server, which says, “yes Twitter is 199.59.148.0.” The 13 root servers can be found throughout the world, run by organizations like the U.S Department of Defense, University of Maryland, University of Southern California, Information of Sciences Institute, a U.S. Army Research Lab, etc.

This whole system (called the DNS, The Domain Name System, or the phone book of the internet) of directing your computer to IP addresses needs to be administered by someone..or something… Why?

1.) To verify that IP addresses aren’t given to people or organizations with nefarious aims (so when you type in www.a-bank-I-can-depend-on.com it doesn’t bring you to a website which asks for your banking information and steals your $) 

2.) To keep the whole system secure 

The system is administered by ICANN, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, an American multi stakeholder group and nonprofit organization. 

(Here’s their most recent press release, 28 February 2022, ICANN-Managed Root Server Clusters to Strengthen Africa’s Internet Infrastructure.

ICANN authenticates and secures the DNS system though a system called DNSSEC.

But what are those keys in the picture? How does the authentication process work?

Asymmetrical encryption. First proposed in 1976 by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman in their paper « New Directions in Cryptography » Quote from the paper’s abstract:

“Widening applications of teleprocessing [computer processing via remote terminals] have given rise to a need for new types of cryptographic systems, which minimize the need for secure key distribution channels and supply the equivalent of a written signature. This paper suggests ways to solve these currently open problems. It also discusses how the theories of communication and computation are beginning to provide the tools to solve cryptographic problems of long standing.”

[This was 46 years before the first Bitcoin in 2009, 8 years before Mark Zuckerberg hatched out of a lizard egg in 1984.]

Introduction: We stand today [1976] on the brink of a revolution in cryptography. The development of cheap digital hardware has freed it from the design limitations of mechanical computing and brought the cost of high grade cryptographic devices down to where they can be used in such commercial applications as remote cash dispensers and computer terminals.”

ATM in 1981, Wellington New Zealand,
Source: https://teara.govt.nz/en
/photograph/24636/the-arrival-of-atms
Genesis Bitcoin Mining, founded in 2013, 3rd largest Bitcoin operation in the world, first located in China and Bosnia, now relocated to Iceland and Canada. Source: https://www.publish0x.com/muchograph/top-5-biggest-bitcoin-mining-farms-in-the-world-with-picture-xqmyqr

“…The development of computer controlled communication networks promises effortless and inexpensive contact between people or computers on opposite sides of the world, replacing most mail and many excursions with telecommunications.” -(The article’s worth a read, only 10 pages long.)

Asymmetrical encryption involves a public and private key. Each key is made up of long numbers that are linked mathematically. This mathematical link creates trust for outsiders accessing a place or a person on the internet. 

You can see in this picture that the mathematical link between Alice’s private key and Alice’s public key allows Bob to trust that the message (Hello Bob) is actually from Alice.

And what is the “mathematical link?” The public and private key are not actually keys but really large prime numbers that are mathematically related to one another. Who knew that prime number’s refusal to be evenly divided by anything besides itself and 1 would help connect millions of humans through trust-injected-super-fast-computer-math?

Everyone can access and read the public key. The private key is extremely secret and can only be held by one entity. 

With a private key, you can make a digital signature over a document/website, thus authenticating the document/website. Because when an outsider wants to access the document/website and verify that it’s authentic, they can “look” at the public key (which again is mathematically linked to the private key) and go “yes, only the corresponding private key could have authenticated this document/website/place, so I know it’s safe.”

This is how DNS is authenticated: the information that www.Twitter.com is 199.59.148.0 is “signed” by Twitter using their private key, then your computer uses Twitter’s public key and the private key signature and goes, “yes, the private key signature can ONLY have been signed by Twitter, it’s safe/really there.”

But is Twitter’s public key also safe and legitimate?

Twitter’s public key is “signed off by a higher authority”: the top level domain server mentioned above, who runs all dotcoms using their private key. And our computers use the top level domain server’s public key to verify that yes, their private signature on Twitter’s public key is legitimate. 

But what about the top level domain server’s public key? What higher authority signs off on that? Basically, we go “up and up” the public/private key chain with higher authorities signing off on “lower rung public keys with higher private keys” until we arrive at ICANN, the company mentioned above.

Up and up and up and up. Root Certificate = highest private key

ICANN has a single private key. 

Every website’s IP address in DNS is secured by ICANN’s single public and private key which is called…

The trust anchor.

Not this anchor…Source: https://www.venafi.com/sites/default/files/styles/823×390/public/content/blog/2020-04/largeanchor_newblog.png?itok=X4W5oe3A

ICANN’s public key is this:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuCkxoKLYO_EQ2GeFtbM_bw

So how could we access ICANN’s private key to take down the internet?

The numbers that form the private key of ICANN that secure the whole DNS are stored on hard drives inside physical boxes called Hardware Security Modules (HSMs). 

https://cogitogroup.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/hardware.png

There are 4 HSMs in the world, kept in 2 pairs,

One pair is located in Culpepper, Virginia and the other in El Segundo Californian, kept 2,500 miles apart: 

Source: Google Maps

To access either of these pairs of HSMs you gotta get passed armed guards, pin pads, card scanners, monitored cages, and biometric stops.

Biometric stop being made by computer-generated hand, https://medium.com/gdg-vit/is-biometric-authentication-the-one-stop-solution-for-security-breaches-778d9e91c49

Even if you obtain an HSM, an HSM  “resists physical tampering,” in that if someone tries to open the device or even drops it, the HSM erases all the keys it stores to prevent a compromise. So to open the HSMs you need several smart cards. And those those smart cards are kept in other boxes which can only be opened by physical keys, which are held by seven people all over the world. Those people (security experts designated by ICANN) are:

If DNS is ever compromised, 5/7 keyholders would have to go to an ICANN facility, use their keys in what is called a “key ceremony,” to obtain the smart cards, then use the smart cards to physically open the HSM to obtain ICANN’s private key. Then use the private key to shut DNS, and almost all of the internet, off.

But how can the private key “shut the internet off?” I’m not 100% certain, but I think you could tamper with the private key in such a way (change a digit in the prime number?) that the public key associated with it wouldn’t allow lower-rung-keys to trust itself/the public key, because the private key had not “signed off on it”, which would be the equivalent of burning the single phone book that everybody uses to access IP addresses/websites, and there would be this chain reaction of mistrust/computers’ inabilities to access pages down the public-private key chain because they couldn’t verify the addresses as being safe/authentic places so when you try to-

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Tous les ordinateurs qui forment l’internet sont identifiés par de longs numéros appelés adresses IP. Mais lorsque vous voulez visiter un endroit comme Twitter, vous ne voulez pas taper “199.59.148.0” (qui est l’une des adresses IP de l’un des serveurs qui hébergent Twitter), mais plutôt www.Twitter.com.

Cela signifie que votre ordinateur doit traduire www.Twitter.com en la bonne adresse IP. Votre ordinateur effectue donc une série de requêtes : il demande à votre système d’exploitation où aller (dans ce cas, disons qu’il ne “sait” pas), puis un serveur de noms récursif (non, il ne sait pas non plus), puis les 13 serveurs racine du monde (oui !) qui vous envoient au serveur de domaine de premier niveau approprié, celui qui gère tous les “.com”, qui vous envoie au bon serveur de noms faisant autorité, qui dit “oui, Twitter est 199.59.148.0”. Les 13 serveurs racine se trouvent dans le monde entier, gérés par des organisations telles que le ministère de la défense des États-Unis, l’université du Maryland, l’université de Californie du Sud, l’Institut des sciences de l’information, un laboratoire de recherche de l’armée américaine, etc.

Tout ce système (appelé DNS, The Domain Name System, ou l’annuaire téléphonique d’internet) consistant à diriger votre ordinateur vers des adresses IP doit être administré par quelqu’un…ou quelque chose…. Pourquoi ?

1.) Pour vérifier que les adresses IP ne sont pas attribuées à des personnes ou des organisations ayant des objectifs néfastes (ainsi, lorsque vous tapez www.a-bank-I-can-depend-on.com, vous n’êtes pas redirigé vers un site web qui vous demande vos informations bancaires et vous vole votre argent).
2.) Pour assurer la sécurité de l’ensemble du système

Le système est administré par l’ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), un groupe américain composé de plusieurs parties prenantes et une organisation à but non lucratif.

L’ICANN authentifie et sécurise le système DNS grâce à un système appelé DNSSEC.

Mais que sont ces clés dans l’image ? Comment fonctionne le processus d’authentification ?

Le cryptage asymétrique. Proposé pour la première fois en 1976 par Whitfield Diffie et Martin Hellman dans leur article New Directions in Cryptography&nbsp. Citation du résumé de l’article :

“L’élargissement des applications du télétraitement [traitement informatique via des terminaux distants] a fait naître le besoin de nouveaux types de systèmes cryptographiques, qui minimisent le besoin de canaux de distribution de clés sécurisés et fournissent l’équivalent d’une signature écrite. Cet article propose des moyens de résoudre ces problèmes actuellement ouverts. Il examine également comment les théories de la communication et du calcul commencent à fournir les outils nécessaires pour résoudre les problèmes cryptographiques de longue date.”

C’était 46 ans avant le premier Bitcoin en 2009, 8 ans avant que Mark Zuckerberg n’éclose d’un œuf de lézard en 1984.

Introduction : Nous nous trouvons aujourd’hui [1976] à l’aube d’une révolution dans le domaine de la cryptographie. Le développement d’un matériel numérique bon marché l’a libéré des limites de conception de l’informatique mécanique et a fait baisser le coût des dispositifs cryptographiques de haute qualité au point qu’ils peuvent être utilisés dans des applications commerciales telles que les distributeurs de billets à distance et les terminaux informatiques.”

“…Le développement des réseaux de communication contrôlés par ordinateur promet un contact sans effort et peu coûteux entre des personnes ou des ordinateurs situés aux antipodes, remplaçant la plupart des courriers et de nombreuses excursions par des télécommunications.”

Le cryptage asymétrique implique une clé publique et une clé privée. Chaque clé est composée de longs chiffres qui sont liés mathématiquement. Ce lien mathématique crée un climat de confiance pour les personnes extérieures qui accèdent à un lieu ou à une personne sur l’internet.

Et quel est le ” lien mathématique ” ? La clé publique et la clé privée ne sont pas réellement des clés mais de très grands nombres premiers qui sont mathématiquement liés les uns aux autres. Qui aurait cru que le refus d’un nombre premier d’être divisé de manière égale par autre chose que lui-même et 1 aiderait à connecter des millions d’humains par le biais d’une mathématique informatique injectée de confiance et super rapide ?

Tout le monde peut accéder à la clé publique et la lire. La clé privée est extrêmement secrète et ne peut être détenue que par une seule entité.

Avec une clé privée, vous pouvez faire une signature numérique sur un document/site web, ce qui permet d’authentifier le document/site web. Parce que lorsqu’une personne extérieure veut accéder au document/site web et vérifier qu’il est authentique, elle peut “regarder” la clé publique (qui, là encore, est mathématiquement liée à la clé privée) et se dire “oui, seule la clé privée correspondante aurait pu authentifier ce document/site web/lieu, donc je sais qu’il est sûr.

C’est ainsi que le DNS est authentifié : l’information que www.Twitter.com est 199.59.148.0 est “signée” par Twitter en utilisant leur clé privée, puis votre ordinateur utilise la clé publique de Twitter et la signature de la clé privée et va, “oui, la signature de la clé privée ne peut SEULEMENT avoir été signée par Twitter, c’est sûr/réellement là.”

Mais la clé publique de Twitter est-elle également sûre et légitime ?

La clé publique de Twitter est “signée par une autorité supérieure” : le serveur de domaine de premier niveau mentionné ci-dessus, qui gère tous les dotcoms en utilisant leur clé privée. Et nos ordinateurs utilisent la clé publique du serveur de domaine de premier niveau pour vérifier que oui, leur signature privée sur la clé publique de Twitter est légitime.

Mais qu’en est-il de la clé publique du serveur du domaine de premier niveau ? Quelle autorité supérieure signe pour cela ? Fondamentalement, nous allons “de haut en bas” de la chaîne de clés publiques/privées avec des autorités supérieures qui signent des “clés publiques d’échelon inférieur avec des clés privées supérieures” jusqu’à ce que nous arrivions à l’ICANN, la société mentionnée ci-dessus.

D’autres traductions seront bientôt disponibles … si vous mourrez d’envie de lire ce qui suit, envoyez-moi un message et je le mettrai en tête de liste des projets…

Primary source for the material in this piece: The Seven People Who Could Turn Off The Internet.

Intelligence, Wars, and The Great Silence

4 minute read

The Great Silence, or The Fermi Paradox is the following:

The universe is extremely big: there are more stars than grains of sands on all of Earth’s beaches (or 5x-10x more than that, depending on your approximations). And around many of these stars are orbiting planets. It is estimated that, in our Milky Way galaxy alone, there are forty billion planets that could support life. The universe is also extremely old: 13.8 billion years old. And we’ve only been around for the last 12.3 million years. If the age of the universe was a year, (called a cosmic year), multicellular life first appeared on Earth on December 5th, humans showed up on December 31st at 2:24pm, domesticated fire at 11:44pm, started farming at 11:59:32, created the wheel at 11:59:49, and modern history/when the first bottle of Dom Perignon was popped by a French monk in 1697 occurred at 11:59:59.4.

Due to enormous size and elderly age of the universe, it is reasonable to believe that intelligent life MUST have arisen throughout the universe on many, many occasions. And it is also reasonable to believe that at least ONE of these intelligent, technology-wielding life forms would have had more than enough time to spread across the universe.

So where are they?

As Ted Chiang wrote, in The Great Silence, “The universe ought to be a cacophony of voices, but instead it’s disconcertingly quiet. Some humans theorize that intelligent species go extinct before they can expand into outer space. If they’re correct, then the hush of the night sky is the silence of a graveyard.”

Ted Chiang is one of my inspirations. Thank you Ted Chiang.

Ted Chiang goes on to talk about intelligent life being out there and aware of us but staying quiet. But I’m more interested in the second idea. When I first read the “universe being a silent graveyard” thought, a theory popped into my mind: What if the intelligence required for ANY life form to leave a planet is also the seed of its self-destruction? Because what does it take for an intelligent life form to leave its planet?

  1. Most likely a sense of identity (Me exist in universe. Me explore universe). Species being aware of themselves can lead to conflict and competition.
  2. A harnessing and concentration of a planet’s resources (Me bring things on planet together to build a ship and leave planet). More conflict and competition. And perhaps exhaustion of planet’s resources.
  3. Knowledge (Me know how to survive in space for long time). Knowledge is power. Power corrupts absolutely…unless you’re George Washington.
Illustration: joecicak (Getty)

Add to this that an asteroid could hit a planet at any time and wipe out your species (sorry dinosaurs). Or, a thought-less thing on the planet could replicate uncontrollably and kill you (F U viruses.)

We were so careful, even wearing masks outside, until the asteroid hit…

And we only have to look at ourselves as a case study to see the danger of intelligence sophisticated enough to engage in space exploration.

During the extremely brief span of the last 110 years, we’ve sent humans to the moon and probes to Mars, well done humanity, but we’ve also accelerated climate change, built nuclear weapons, had two World Wars, and dropped two nuclear bombs that killed over 150,000 people instantly (and 214,000 by 1945).

I can’t help but compare humanity to the literary trope of the genius being linked with insanity/sickness. Our greatest artists were often insane, tortured, suicidal, cruel, extreme. Not all of them, but Caravaggio was a notorious criminal and murderer, Michael Jackson a child molester, Michael Jordan an addicted gambler (when MJ was asked how he could lose $3,000,000 one night in a casino, he replied, “I don’t like to lose,”) Eminem was only good at rapping when he was on drugs, Van Gogh cut off his own eye after a fight with his friend Gauguin then gave the ear to a prostitute, Joanne Rowling suffered through a disastrous marriage and an abusive husband, Frida Kahlo experienced incredible pain, the list goes on. To create great art often means an extreme personality has to experience extreme suffering or take risks and actions that could also potentially cause the creator’s demise. So maybe the great art of having the “species-capability of leaving a planet and exploring the universe” is inextricably linked up to species-destructive behavior? If you are a high-achieving individual, often something else has to give or in some way you have to pay.

Carvaggaio: “I paint, then I kill, then I paint, then I kill.”
Sin Esperanza / Without Hope by Frida Kahlo

Recently I finished reading Jeff Hawkins excellent book, published last year, A Thousand Brains. (Notes on it below.) Highly recommend. And he shared the theory I proposed above, using this analogy (invitation to a party = intelligence in the universe, attending the party = exploration of the universe for other life forms):

“Imagine fifty people are invited to an evening party. Everyone arrives at the party at a randomly chosen time. When they get there, they open the door and step inside. What are the chances they see a party going on or an empty room? It depends on how long they each stay. If all the partygoers stay for one minute before leaving, then almost everyone who shows up will see an empty room and conclude that no one else came to the party. If the partygoers stay for an hour or two, then the party will be a success, with lots of people in the room at the same time.

We don’t know how long intelligent life typically lasts. The Milky Way galaxy is about thirteen billion years old. Let’s say that it has been able to support intelligent life for about ten billion years. That is the length of our party. If we assume that humans survive as a technological species for ten thousand years, then it is as if we showed up for a six-hour party but only stayed for 1/50th of a second. Even if tens of thousands of other intelligent beings show up for the same party, it is likely that we won’t see anyone else while we are there. We will see an empty room. If we expect to discover intelligent life in our galaxy, it requires that intelligent life occurs often and that it lasts a long time.”

Only staying at a party for 1/50th of a second. Damn. Open the front door, HEY!, *SLAM*…who was that?

Hawkins goes on to write that humanity needs to engage in “estate planning,” or creating a record of our existence in case we kill ourselves off. I agree, especially after the events of the past week. We gotta get our quarreling asses on Mars, pronto, or create some type of self-sustaining satellite-archive that orbits the sun.

The previous chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, says that Vladimir Putin has lost his sense of reality and that Russia’s attack on Ukraine is a turning point in history. According to a New Yorker article published two days ago, Putin has warned the world, “Whoever tries to interfere with us should know that Russia’s response will be immediate and will lead you to such consequences as you have never experienced in your history.” He continued to say that, “Russia is today one of the most powerful nuclear states.” Was he flexing or bluffing? Probably. But should we still be concerned? What if Putin is bitter that the World Taekwondo withdrew his honorary 9th dan black belt?

Interesting thought experiment: if you were part of Putin’s inner circle and you learned of his plan to fire nuclear weapons, would you have the courage to take him out?

There are 13,000 nuclear weapons on Earth, located in 9 countries. 90% of all nuclear bombs are now under Russian and U.S. control. Russia is believed to have more warheads, around 6,000. The majority of American and Russian bombs are more than 10x more powerful – in explosive yield, than the bombs that decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has spit in the face of international laws and his own past policies. Dmitry Kiselyev, a Kremlin propagandist said last Sunday, “In total our submarines are capable of launching over 500 nuclear warheads, which are guaranteed to destroy the U.S. and all the countries of NATO to boot.”

Putin has failed to rapidly conquer Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine. His army is having supply issues. Will Russia dominate Ukraine, or will Ukraine survive? In any case, with humanity’s propensity towards wars, destroying the planet, tripling the population in the last 70 years, constructing nuclear weapons, we gotta engage in estate planning.

The clock’s ticking. Let’s at least leave a calling card at the intelligence-in-the-universe party, and include instructions on why to ignore the cheese plate and to try the champagne.


A Thousand Brains Notes

229: From the universe’s perspective, this is an arbitrary distinction: neither the poliovirus nor the wildflower is better or worse than the other. We make the choice about what us in our best interest. 
226: Interesting: « I have never been a fan of science-fiction literature. »
216: « It is estimated that there are forty billion planets in the Milky Way alone that could support life. »
210: No one knows what will happen, but it is unlikely that we are done creating ways to destroy ourselves. 
205: Copying yourself is a fork in the road, not an extension of it. Two sentient beings continue after the fork, not one. Once you realize this, then the appeal of uploading your brain begins to fade. 
203: The brain has 100 billion neurons and several hundred trillion synapses 
182: False models of the world can spread and thrive as long as the false beliefs help the believers spread their genes. 
143: Without the old brain, no fear or sadness. 
142: Our fear of death is created by older parts of our brain 
135: For example, the way the brain learns models of the world is intimately tied to our sense of self and how we form beliefs.
131 « The brain of an intelligent machine will consist of many nearly identical elements that can be connected to a variety of moveable sensors. »
130: Prédiction os how a column tests and updates its model.
129: To be intelligent, machines:
1.) Learning Continuously 2.) Learning via Movement 3.) many models 4.) Using Reference Frames to Store Knowledge 
80: Discovering a useful reference frame is the most difficult part of learning, even though most of the time we are not consciously aware of it. 
79: what we think next spends on which direction we mentally move through a reference frame, in the same way that what we see next in a town depends on which direction we move from our current location. 
71: Thinking occurs when we activate successive locations in reference frames. 
62: It is as if nature stripped down the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex to a minimal form, made tens of thousands of copies, and arranged them side by side in cortical columns. 
38: Forgetting happens when old or unused connections are removed entirely.
37: Everything we know is stored in the connections between neurons 
37: Thoughts and experiences are always the result of a set of neurons that are active at the same time. 
36: Neurons look like trees 
30: Prediction was a ubiquitous function of the neocortex.
26: vision and language are fundamentally the same. 
23: Intelligence, language, touch, are all manifestations of the same underlying cortical algorithm. 
23: a slice of cortex responsible for touch looks like a slice of cortex responsible for language or touch. 
19: There are no pure motor regions and no pure sensory regions. 
11: The human neocortex is particularly large, occupying 70% of the volume of our brain. 
11: no matter how smart or sophisticated we are, breathing, eating, sex, and reflex reactions are still critical to our survival. 
-Faculty that master chess and Go are not those that can cope with the complexity of the real world. 
-Uploading brain to computer wouldn’t be fun 

Three, Simple Steps For Keeping Your Website Safe

2 minute read

This essay is for people who do not consider themselves technologically savvy, who often feel like they’re sinking in the ocean of the internet, but who have a website (boat) or plan to build one (you’re a pirate). This post is also for burgeoning journalists or artists who are not skillful with computers but who want to someday showcase their work online. If you ever took a computer programming class or spent your sad childhood on the internet, please move on to another thing, because when you read my suggestions you’ll likely think, WHAT A SILLY DUMBASS! HOW DID HE NOT KNOW THAT SHIT ALREADY!? Because I spent my sad childhood digging holes in my neighbor’s backyard.

1.) Update your website, plugins, tools, etc. habitually

On January 10th, at the precise moment my loxodonta molar tooth made contact with a king figurine in a Galette des Rois tart cake, my website was hacked by a virus. I named him Neo and tried to kill him. At some point during the 10+ hours I spent on the phone with my domain provider (D.P.) I learned that the cause was my failure to update my website and its plugins. I guess viruses are attracted to old versions of things (future essay: how are wandering viruses created in the first place and how do they find random places on the internet to infect?) According to D.P. the virus was not targeting just my website and its plugin-MILFS, but was a “wide net” searching for bank info, credit card numbers, ways to get cash. As I talked to D.P. on the phone, I could tell by the professionally condescending tone of their voice that they were surprised by my technological ignorance/ineptitude. Here’s my explanation/justification:

I created my website in 2016 with the help of a wordpress freelancer I found through Craig’s list (Sam, a patient Hasidic Jewish man who lives in Bed-Stuy, what are you doing now Sam?) and through mind-numbing youtube videos, and I thought that once my website was created I could forget about the structure and focus on other things besides “up-keep.” I was wrong. If I had simply clicked an update button every once in a while, I would have saved myself 15 hours of stress and uncertainty, 70 euros, and my cyber dignity. While on the phone, on hold, listening to crackling orchestral music, and staring at the swirling water of my petty existence, I couldn’t help but apply a cliché life lesson to this little annoying situation: if you ignore little updates in your life, little adaptions, little up-keep, you’ll have to pay for them in a big way later on. Moral: update, just click that button.

2.) Download anti-virus software

Here’s a safe link to do this that my domain provider sent me: https://www.botfree.eu/en/eucleaner/index.html

The download is free, takes 1 minute, and once you have it, all you have to do is click the anti-virus button once in a while and it checks all the files on your computer. Another “trick” you can do with an anti-virus scanner is that if you have any files or plugins on your website that are suspicious/can dodge bullets, you can download the files to your computer, then run the scanner. I know this because I had to go into the “back-office” of my website (the webspace provided by my domain provider) download potentially infected files, then run the scanner on each of them. I received an email that looked like this (below)…then spent four hours scanning, please scroll down and enjoy! (So you wanna to smoke a cigarette Jimmy? Well then smoke the whole goddamn pack!)

/clickandbuilds/JWKash/wp-admin/css/colors/midnight/livmsjsy.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash/wp-includes/css/dist/.2109369a.ico
./clickandbuilds/JWKash/wp-includes/theme-compat/vzjlknpz.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash/wp-includes/theme-compat/.f7e29d3b.ico
./clickandbuilds/JWKash/wp-includes/theme-compat/mogedqvw.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash/wp-includes/js/crop/.c09c14d4.ico
./clickandbuilds/JWKash/wp-content/themes/twentysixteen/template-parts/content-page.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash/wp-content/themes/Newsmag/includes/category_templates/td_category_template_5.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash/wp-content/themes/Newsmag/searchform.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash/wp-content/plugins/js_composer/assets/css/lib/vc-open-iconic/02e1d761.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash/wp-content/plugins/js_composer/assets/tfpipcwz.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash/wp-content/plugins/js_composer/include/templates/shortcodes/vc_column.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash/wp-content/plugins/js_composer/include/classes/shortcodes/rev-slider-vc.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash/wp-content/plugins/userpro/languages/llbyjbwp.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash/wp-content/plugins/userpro/addons/requests/index.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash/wp-content/plugins/simple-membership/images/xzstfwfh.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash/wp-content/ngg/.ebdbf909.ico
./clickandbuilds/JWKash/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/hwhylygc.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash/wp-content/upgrade/.ac152d48.ico
./clickandbuilds/JWKash/index.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash/wp-settings.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash/wp-config.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash-TMP-withMalware/index.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash-TMP-withMalware/wp-settings.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash-TMP-withMalware/wp-includes/rest-api/endpoints/class-wp-rest-comments-controller.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash-TMP-withMalware/wp-includes/SimplePie/Net/jubbzdkc.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash-TMP-withMalware/wp-content/plugins/js_composer/assets/css/lib/vc-open-iconic/02e1d761.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash-TMP-withMalware/wp-content/plugins/js_composer/assets/tfpipcwz.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash-TMP-withMalware/wp-content/plugins/js_composer/include/templates/shortcodes/vc_column.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash-TMP-withMalware/wp-content/plugins/simple-membership/images/xzstfwfh.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash-TMP-withMalware/wp-content/plugins/userpro/addons/requests/index.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash-TMP-withMalware/wp-content/themes/Newsmag/includes/category_templates/td_category_template_5.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash-TMP-withMalware/wp-content/themes/Newsmag/searchform.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash-TMP-withMalware/wp-content/upgrade/.b6f41baa.ico
./clickandbuilds/JWKash-TMP-withMalware/wp-content/ngg/.ebdbf909.ico
./clickandbuilds/JWKash-TMP-withMalware/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/hwhylygc.php
./clickandbuilds/JWKash-TMP-withMalware/.metadata/index.php

3.) Last but not least, your website is never safe. Put all your content somewhere else

At some point, I admit, while talking to D.P., watching youtube videos on cleaning infected websites, and attempting to troubleshoot on my own, I almost had a mental breakdown. Why? Because I’ve probably spent over 800 hours working on my website, writing essays, finding pictures, reading sentences out loud to my bulldog Hank to find just the right rhythm (if his jowls twitch the sentence is too clunky), formatting, etc…I have 3875 subscribers (500 are probably robots), and all this would have disappeared if D.P. and I hadn’t been able to get rid of the virus. Of course it would not have been the end of the world if my website died, but my website is something special to me, it’s something I built, like Frankenstein, and it would have been three years of work down the drain if I hadn’t been able to recover it…

I now realize that if I really care about all the work I’ve done, I have to put it all in a word document, then on a hard drive. I suggest you do the same. Then, to be even more safe, bury the hard drive in your neighbor’s backyard.


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The Mechanics/Why-Can’t-It?! of Wifi

In my apartment there is patchy Wifi, so when I’m trying to research the mating patterns of snow leopards and the internet fails I’m driven to the brink of insanity. Furthermore, as a budding and brooding journalist I find myself grabbing for my phone like a mother for her-WHERE’S MY PRECIOUS LITTLE BABY whenever I’m in line at Shake Shack or Popeyes, and if the Wifi is uncooperative I’m filled with an unquenchable rage. Don’t ridicule my addiction-to-connection just yet, as the lauded journalist, James B. Stewart, wrote in Follow the Story: How To Write Successful Nonfiction, “In today’s ecosystem of news, the greatest sin is to cut oneself off from the conversation.”

Ladies and Gentlemen, if John Knych sends me one more picture of a snow leopard with the caption, “Sup Jim,” I swear to god I will end this conversation and…

Jim is right that journalists must consistently engage in society’s dialogue, especially when it becomes polarized, paranoid, or paternal, so our Wifi connections must be sound. The news conversation is becoming faster and readers are expecting more cutting-edge content. If I plan to survive and thrive in this cut-throat ecosystem, it looks like I must try and understand the nature of Wifi like the snow leopards understand the mountain ranges of Central and South Asia.

Author’s note: this snow leopard did not survive.
Author’s note: this snow leopard did not survive.

It was once widely believe that “Wifi” stood for wireless fidelity, but it is actually not an acronym and does not stand for anything. The term was coined by Phil Belanger in August 1999, when the branding consulting firm, Interbrand Corporation, wanted a name catchier than, “IEEE 802. 11b Direct Sequence.” Wifi is also the same thing as WLAN which stands for Wireless Local Area Network. The difference between Wifi and the dinosaur tail known as the ethernet cable (ethernet is slower because of the resistance in the wires) is that Wifi transmits data (0-1-1-0-1-0-0-0-0-1-1 = picture of a ManBearPig) through electro-magnetic waves in the air. But unlike heat waves, Wifi waves don’t need the elements of the air to affect electronics/enlighten your soul. Also, unlike radio waves which sometimes have wavelengths up to 3kHz long (100 kilometers), Wifi is transmitted on a much shorter frequency: either 2.4 Ghz or 5.0 Ghz (about 12 centimeters long). Most microwaves operate on this frequency, which is why they can interfere with the signal and thus your spiritual well-being.

Many things can interfere with a Wifi signal because these waves are sent back and forth between the router and your computer/phone. It’s an electrical conversation. Basically, through the electromagnetic pulses of your router, your computer/phone is instructed on what to do with each pixel on the screen (0-1-1-1-0 or off-on-on-on-off = another picture of a ManBearPig). Generally, the signal can’t go more than 150 feet from a signal router. The Wifi signal can be affected by the objects it encounters, such as concrete, wood, metal, other Wifi, and murderous clowns. You can actually buy “Wifi paint” that prevents other Wifis from interfering with your Wifi signal. The way you position your router affects the strength of the signal throughout your house/dumpster you sleep in on the weekends. Here are five ways to improve your Wifi signal:

1.) Lift your router off the ground. Many routers broadcast waves slightly downwards, and the material of the floor can affect the signal.

2.) Don’t put your router behind a hall or in a closet. Again, the obstructions cause interference. Ideally, you should hang it above your bed like a disco ball.

Disco Ball 80s

3.) Point the antennas of your router in different directions. If you have two antennas, point one horizontal and one vertical. Why? Because devices work best when their internal antennas are parallel with the routers. Most antennas inside laptops are horizontal. With a cell phone, the direction of the internal antennas depends on how you’re holding/desperately clutching it. So by bending your antennas of your router in different directions you have the highest chance of having a parallel match/good signal/nirvana.

4.) Download a wifi-signal-strength app on your phone so you can test which places in your apartment have good signals and why. Don’t tell anyone you did this.

5.) Don’t put your router near other electronics (ones with motors inside of them), like televisions, computers, or your Dance Dance Revolution machines. They can interfere with the router signal.

My favorite part of this video is the woman on the left (his mom?) just chillen in front of the fan.

While writing this essay I realized that my router was sitting two inches from my television. It was also a few feet from the printer. I’ve moved it to a better/less disrupting location and my Wifi has significantly improved. Now my life is beautiful again. I hope the suggestions above can help you too.

manbearpig
Sincerely, ManBearPig

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Sources:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-does-wi-fi-work/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmabFJUKMdg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=METB1o4UAT8

https://www.howtogeek.com/259000/what-does-the-fi-in-wi-fi-mean/

Why does turning malfunctioning electronics off, then on, work technological miracles?

From cell phones to personal computers to multi-million dollar pieces of electronic equipment, turning any of these devices off, then on, is frequently the best and simplest solution to a technological problem. The layman’s impatient neglect of this quick fix is often the bane of an I.T. worker’s existence, as shown in this comedy skit:

So what’s going on? Why does this technique work so well?

The best analogy I’ve read for understanding the inner workings of a computer and this miracle phenomenon is the mailroom.

Like a computer, a mailroom receives many different inputs which have to be organized, categorized, and sent out. If the mailroom is designed and managed efficiently, then the jobs of sorting letters and packages are done easily and smoothly. There has to be enough employees to adequately match the quantity of incoming mail to each set of zip codes. There has to be someone at the front desk to deal with walk-ins. Rolling bins have to be large enough to contain all of the daily packages. Stamps have to be readily available. The mail for the day has to be loaded into trucks. Etc.

Similarly, a computer programmer thinks of as many inputs as he can which a computer will have to cope with, and designs the responding actions which will be applied to these inputs. This piece of mail goes into this bin. This container is rolled to this loading dock at 3pm. Etc. But cyber reality, like our own, is complex and all the possible scenarios can’t be accounted for.

What if a famous actor moved into a zip code that was previously occupied by a low population of unknowns? All of a sudden, 10,000 letters of fan mail are directed to this one zip code, and the worker assigned to this area can’t keep up with the incoming mail. In the beginning of the day, the worker dutifully and successfully piles letter after letter, but soon the stack becomes too high, falls over, and affects the overall organization of the worker’s area. He calls for help from another part of the mailroom (Hey Jimmy! Shit’s hitting the fan!) and the initial problem snowballs and becomes systemic.

What if the famous actor posted on his website a fake address, encouraging his fans to send him a letter if they wanted an autographed photo of him buck naked and riding a polar bear? The poor bastard in the mailroom receives the letters, but doesn’t know where to put them, so he creates a new pile. Again, this new pile clutters the work area and the worker has to call for help. He puts the fake address letters on Jimmy’s desk, and this also slows down Jimmy.

These cascading problems lead to instability and frustration throughout the mailroom. Sometimes, it becomes so bad that everyone in the mailroom just puts their hands up and says, “You know what? Screw this shit. No more work.” That’s when your electronic device freezes.

Instead of getting frustrated and quitting, though, the best solution is to acknowledge the problem, clear everything away, and start from the beginning (a stable state where the majority of testing has been already done). If the people in the mailroom keep working they are only going to make the problems worse. Turning off your electronic device is like an announcement in the mailroom which says: “Everybody clear your desk, close any open files, and return to our initial schedule.” Some things will likely be lost, but the mail that was already sorted into bins and trucks before the disaster will not be affected. Furthermore, the skills and tools for organizing mail for the rest of the day are not affected, but are in fact refreshed and rejuvenated by a return to a known, starting position, a good initial state. Even if the previous problem still needs to be tackled, a return to the initial, known state allows the workers to go through what they were doing again, but this time taking a different path through the code using different variables (“Hey Jimmy, more letters are coming in for that goddamn actor, make room on your desk for me so if this gets out of hand again we have space”).

To conclude, I believe human beings have a similar strategy for coping with snowballing problems and mounting frustration, which is our re-set tool for returning to an initial, known, and stable position:

Sleep.

 

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