asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: in the sense of 'couldve looked for honest work!' ?
asciilifeform: at least in cement, the empirical fits in a constant. in meat work, it's a wall-sized (and necessarily incomplete) chart of bleargh.
asciilifeform: ( funnily enuff, asciilifeform later ended up returning to meat, for some yrs, but thats another story )
asciilifeform: ( re legend, i have nfi if true, iirc several countries claimed priority )
asciilifeform: the experience thoroughly cured asciilifeform of wanting anyffing to do with the field -- meat offers very little in the way of 'unifying theories'.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: re paracetamol << lulzily, asciilifeform's 1st paying jerb was in a lab where studied inflammatory cascades. and legend had it that in very same room paracetamol was (by entirely unrelated folx, long ago) 1st tested .
asciilifeform: ( errybody makes fun of the d00d, even speak of 'darwin award', but there was not really alternative to what he was doing, the $maxint robotic manipulators were built ~later~, after corpses were cold )
asciilifeform: incidentally much noise was made re the elaborate calculations of early nukes, but good chunk of the design params ~also~ only were accessible empirically. hence the slotin incident.☟︎
asciilifeform: simply that the answer contains constants that were derived empirically.
asciilifeform: PeterL: i dun think i ever once said 'not answerable', lol
asciilifeform: PeterL: i can describe in roughly similar terms what the molybdenum does in modern steel. but not why needs such-and-such % , for different machineabilities.
asciilifeform: it was clealy enuff of an idea that there was pretty close match, militarily
asciilifeform: i.e. problem was not in 'shortage of component base', there.
asciilifeform: can't help but think of the roman bath in late-roman britain
asciilifeform: this , observe, is problem , even nao, even while component base ~is~ available
asciilifeform: fwiw e.g. FUCKGOATS is repeatable, for so long as component base is available. ( and i include paper schematics & listing with it, for a reason..) but the direr problem is the shortage of literate operator who even knows wtf he is holding in hands
asciilifeform: but if it is possible in particular instances, and i'm missing it, i'm all ears.
asciilifeform: generally i dun work with 'make technology that will survive fullbore apocalypse ~as technology~ (vs indiv artifacts) ' -- this is above asciilifeform's paygrade.
asciilifeform: i.e. spiffy but doomed-through-nonrepeatability artifacts.
asciilifeform: possibly i am missing a subtler mircea_popescu subthread , but asciilifeform's orig puzzler was 'how to avoid making a bolix', if you will.
asciilifeform: well in the cited episode he felt the sharp end of the problem stick
asciilifeform: it would be fascinating to see how truman would have answered to this.
asciilifeform: can't replicate -- not tech. call it sumthingelse.
asciilifeform: rifle did not become serious weapon in the field until barrels -- interchangeable. etc
asciilifeform: like it or not, 'faberge egg' is not a good weapon. to which i'll add that imho trb only recently (with 'aggression') graduated from 'faberge' status, previously noad required regular babysitting, and i've found that this is no longer so
asciilifeform: to stalin's credit, he was not particularly frightened by the hiroshima show that was put on for him: understood that 'it was faberge egg'
asciilifeform: ( not to belittle the timetravel adventures of phf !111 )
asciilifeform: kurchatov et al approached the 'assembly line' problem slightly smarter (can debate how much 'from cribbing' and how much -- not) , and did not need own decade.
asciilifeform: in historicals: there is record where a 'let's nuke su nao before they can us' plan was given to truman, in '47. he did not sign, likely because it called for ~30 'fat men', whereas the entire stockpile was: 4. and grew at 3-4 / yr, assembly line stayed 'phf' for just under a decade, long enuff for ~parity.
asciilifeform: ( in which vein, we're still waiting for, e.g., a replacement gauss... )
asciilifeform: even 'mircea_popescus' get replicated... albeit very, very slowly
asciilifeform: anyffing that can be replicated from recipe by illiterate red army conscripts, if you will -- 'technology'. the remainder -- 'phd assembly'. fortunately most useful items fall somewhere in the spectrum
asciilifeform: emphasis is on the 'phd', not 'assembly line'. faberge dead, no moar eggs
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: 'magic', in this sense, is a phlogiston, a measure of ignorance.
asciilifeform: even the screwdriver on yer desk -- yes it is hard, but the maker never knew why precisely ~that~ ratio of molybdenum is to be used.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: by the 'to your eyes' standard -- i dun think i own any artifacts that work to any other standard. even cement block -- we do not presently know precisely why cement hardens.☟︎
asciilifeform: ( it's a pretty depressing yarn, the earthling attempts to make sense of the rubbish, sum to ~nuffin, and they fight over the scraps )
asciilifeform: this is the model of 'magic' i was thinking of.
asciilifeform: (largely not in the direction of betterment)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: the strugatsky brothers, before sinking into senile delirium, had a tale 'roadside picnic', where unknown aliens land and leave buncha rubbish behind, and immediately depart. the rubbish includes 'usefuls', such as 'eternal batteries', but also various deadlies, and plenty of things 'in between', and earthling culture is rearranged by it.☟︎
asciilifeform: granted, the stick dun work if nobody wields it, just as turing's meat didn't
asciilifeform: and evidently the greek meatstick is not overwhelmingly superior instrument, or would have taken over globe and we wouldn't even think to have the thread, unless i'm missing something
asciilifeform: prussian, or if you prefer, sov, or jp, stick-beatin', does work to produce something like working minds
asciilifeform: iirc he wasn't even able to keep his catamites from ratting him out in brit kangaroo court
asciilifeform: i suspect that there's a missing term in this equation. e.g. turing did not, afaik, create any great maths folx with his (very active) cock
asciilifeform: but evidently straw wings dun suffice for working plane
asciilifeform: prolly why the brits ended up cargoculting it, neh
asciilifeform: worked out, i guess, for the greeks... for a spell
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: there are examples in the past, e.g. the orig nazi folx. (or the ww1 britain, from prev thread?) but these didn't end well.
