asciilifeform: (phun phakt, there are 2 wholly separate pyramids of 'clearance' in usa; DOE (atomic) and DOD (pentagon)
asciilifeform: which is why anyone with usg 'ts' reading the logz is technically in a state of sin, and subject to disrobing, unless specifically blessed by u.s. DOE 'q clearance' pope.
asciilifeform: i shit thee not, this is the actual law in usa since '50s
asciilifeform: the H-bomb. It symbolizes the banality of evil which is the essence of the whole H-bomb business. Workaday people doing workaday jobs building doomsday machines based on 1950's technology, while civilization marches bravely into the new millennium, oblivious to the death sentence imposed by a secret technology involving plastic foam. It calls to mind the most famous line from The Graduate, "One word: plastics."'
asciilifeform: Errata, which I dubbed "exploding styrofoam," the corresponding phrase would be "a gas of electrons." The implosion of the secondary is driven by matter pressure, not radiation pressure. Incidentally, Dow Chemical complained that Styrofoam is a trademark, like Xerox, and that nuclear weapons do not contain Styrofoam. Point conceded; the foam is generic. ... I like the idea of a nuisance material, plastic foam, as the real secret of
asciilifeform: 'In the one-page Errata in the December 1979 issue, I explained that the turkey in the oven is a plastic "channel filler" which captures x-ray energy and explodes with enormous force, purely as the result of getting very hot very fast (ten million degrees in half a microsecond). In the original H-bomb article, I had described the conditions inside the radiation channel in terms of "a gas of photons." For my revised explanation in the
asciilifeform: but on the other hand if he knows that it is to cut heads with.
asciilifeform: this would happen if he lived in some heavenly vacuum where the purpose of the axe is entirely unclear
asciilifeform: (communicate to intergalactic whateverthefucks)
asciilifeform: i would have a bit of a tougher cookie on my hands
asciilifeform: well yes, if i were in the position of the hero of that one asimov story where he is trying to communicate what humans look like over radio, but he has no idea even which way their displays scan, or what the hell they use to decode signal in the first place,
asciilifeform: but in fact the would-be maker still needs the right unobtainium
asciilifeform: when you ~think~ you have reduced the item to a recipe of dead words
asciilifeform: (whether real, or fictional in whole or part, i obviously do not know)
asciilifeform: i was specifically citing example of failed technologizing
asciilifeform: but it reads like an elementary 'damascus steel'
asciilifeform: anyway i was not there, and cannot say how much the entire story was simply a cover for embezzling half a bil usd
asciilifeform: and eventually had to reverse-engineer old samples and found the missing 'gotta have trace elements x, y, z'
asciilifeform: they spent, supposedly, a few 100 mil, massive failures
asciilifeform: but ~no longer~ present in 2000s when they resumed production
asciilifeform: as it turned out to have a hidden dependence on an impurity which was present in the feedstock at the time
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: story is, the particulars of making just-that (and it had to be just-that, on account of the detonation process) foam, were never fully written down
asciilifeform: with particular neutron cross-section
asciilifeform: if mircea_popescu does, plox report back, i will read.
asciilifeform: well the damascene pattern is there. but no, i did not personally buy these swords and go back in time to 14th c and fight with them for 20y
asciilifeform: to technologize is to break apart magic and make it repeatable - e.g., damascus steel was magic (gotta be in the right time, right place, use iron from here-and-here, and whisper the incantations yer grandfather taught you for good measure, and be of pure aryan blood, and ....) but then somebody builds mass spectrometer and today you can buy a damascus knife from helsinki
asciilifeform: thus far thread seems to compress to a very discouraging http://btcbase.org/log/2016-05-19#1468598 ; mircea_popescu: 'me an' the other wizards got vastly moar powerful!1111' asciilifeform: 'waiwut how' mircea_popescu: 'yer puny brain will never apprehend the smallest part of it'☝︎
asciilifeform: i assume mircea_popescu read, e.g., polya
asciilifeform: but on the other hand it is not wholly impossible to write something meaningful and useful re mathematical creativity.
asciilifeform: if mircea_popescu is going into 'mathematical creativity has never been and likely will never be technologized' he is preaching to choir.
asciilifeform: and generally not-done for wholly political reasons.
asciilifeform: but if mircea_popescu is a gifted telepath, clairvoyant, and spirit-summoner and proposes to use 'technology' to describe his abilities, imho this is abuse of terminology.
