asciilifeform: if 'meta-nsa' exists in the flesh, it's probably an assemblage of one grey-haired officer and his two dozen or so apprentices, embedded deep within the scar tissue of usg and surviving in spite of, rather than due to, the overall management.☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform not convinced of the physical existence of meta-nsa. it's a gedanken-nsa.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: a petrified forest is not a forest.
asciilifeform: a police dog (at least, ones trained in the russian tradition) will attack if fed by a stranger.
asciilifeform: turns out, he writes, one of the most reliable ways to get bitten by such an animal is to give it the impression of attempting to feed it
asciilifeform: he wrote an interesting autobio (afaik, never translated) about his dog work
asciilifeform: turns out his profession was - police dog trainer & handler.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: in 2010 i concocted a variant of the test that could be carried out for approx. 50k USD, from scratch. schwartz answered that, in his estimation, the test would work to spec, but results would not be accepted by the field unless carried out on one of the two existing eotvos balances. one - adelberger's, one - chicom.☟︎☟︎
asciilifeform: (short version: adelberger tested all variants of crud, including left- and right-handed machine screws (!) and gleefully pronounced - no parity violation. refused under any pretext to test schwartz and petitjean's 'chiralane' molecule.)
asciilifeform recently tried to check on herr schwartz - he isn't answering. possibly he went 'full perelman' mode.
asciilifeform was acquainted with one such '1%' - al schwartz. who has an eminently testable hypothesis re: parity violation, and spent a decade (& counting) trying to score 2 weeks on an eotvos rotor balance. while the charlatans build their $b colliders.
asciilifeform: see mircea_popescu's skyscraper example.
asciilifeform: the harm of the mega-machines is not the wasted money, but that nearly every student of physics now believes that the field is inescapably 'about' the machines
asciilifeform: false dichotomy. maxwell needed no $b hardware.
asciilifeform: 100 yrs from now - no one. but they're the ones who get to build machines.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: not everyone. just the grant-eaters.
asciilifeform: DreadKnight: his intellectual milieu is more crippling than his paralysis
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: so you know it's a lie.
asciilifeform: 'encyclopaedists can no longer exist'
asciilifeform: 'complexity is irreducible now, the only possible kind of man is now the stamp collector'
asciilifeform: DreadKnight: things are getting more and more complex now, it takes more work and time << the motto of the 20th c. intellectual impostor class, in a nutshell.
asciilifeform: DreadKnight, midnightmagic: not insisting that the particle hijinx have no possible applications, in a far future. just that these applications will require a resurrection of the caliber of men we had 1800-1900.
asciilifeform: nope. the latter - navel gazing. no testability given their tech.
asciilifeform: this is not, as the particle smashers tell us, an accident.
asciilifeform: notice how every piece of actual 'practical' machinery we have that makes use of 'modern' physics, the physics in question is 1940s or prior ?
asciilifeform: the string folks explicitly renounced testability of hypothesis! if that isn't an open declaration of charlatanry, what is ?
asciilifeform: good litmus test - anyone involved with 'strings'
asciilifeform: cern, other 'strong force' shenanigans are a good example of 'chinese' scholastiwank. the people involved - entirely uninterested in systematization of knowledge, much less practical use
