This does seem promising for organ preservation, but it raises the issue (as cryonicists do) of when is someone dead? If it’s not information death, declarations are intrinsically premature, if the person can be put in an ambulance to the future.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Why America Can’t Build
NEPA and unions have become a very expensive luxury. But California HSR was a terrible idea even without these problems.
Artificial Intelligence
Thoughts on the coming age. A first of two essays.
Nichelle Nichols
RIP.
Bad Newspace News
Masten was an alumni factory, resulting in a lot of other innovative companies. They were arguably the progenitor to SpaceX’s success at reusability. I hope they’ll be able to restructure.
Weird Fedora Problem
Fedora 35 has started randomly crashing. Sometimes it happens when I highlight and ctrl-C a URL in Brave, but sometime it just does it on its own, as in I go away and when I try to wake it up, it’s just black screens. Any ideas? I’ve reported it to Brave.
[Wednesday update]
Now it’s randomly doing it when I try to move the cursor in Libre Office Writer. It doesn’t seem to be a resource issue; none of the cores are very busy, and it’s only using about half my memory.
[Bumped]
[Update a while later]
The triggering event primarily seems to be a copy to clipboard. I managed to do it twice in a row with the same action, copying a specific email address from Thunderbird. I’ve logged into it via ssh from my laptop, so when it happens again, I’ll be able to see if the machine is still running. If so, it’s clearly a GUI issue, maybe a problem with Wayland. While I’m connected, I’m going to back up data to the laptop so I can work from there until I resolve the issue.
[Late-afternoon update]
Well, it’s apparently more than a GUI problem (which doesn’t mean that it isn’t caused by Wayland). When it died, my ssh session died as well, and I couldn’t reconnect. I guess the next step is try logging in with Xorg, and see if it persists.
[Update late Thursday night]
Well, clearly it was Wayland. I switched the default to Xorg this morning, and it’s gone all day without issues.
[Bumped]
The Battle For Kherson
…and why it matters.
James Lovelock
RIP.
To the degree that one agrees with the Gaia hypothesis, space settlers would be helping it reproduce.
An Interesting Precedent
…for lunar resource utilization. I hadn’t heard of the Breaking Ground Trust, but we’ll see where this goes.
The Value Of Space Exploration
For its part, Webb suffered repeated delays and cost overruns even before the COVID-19 pandemic slowed work on a number of projects in both the public and private sectors. Initially meant to launch in 2010 at a cost of $3 billion, Webb eventually launched last December at a final cost of more than $10 billion. Similarly, the enormous Space Launch System rocket has cost more and taken far longer to lift off from Kennedy Space Center than originally planned – though NASA now expects to finally launch the rocket that will take astronauts back to the Moon at the end of August or beginning of September.
All the same, criticisms focused on excessive delays and busted budgets tend to fall by the wayside when we see the results of America’s space exploration programs. That’s certainly been the case with Webb, whose first images have received a rapturous reception by the media and public alike. But few people would say that this sense of wonder and inspiration is the reason America invests as much of its national resources as it does in space exploration, and even fewer would say it’s worth the financial costs involved.
One of these things is not like the others. I’m confident that history will record that SLS/Orion played a trivial, if not non-existent role in actual space exploration. And (as always) I would reiterate that out exploration of space will be much more effective when it is rightly viewed as not an end, but a means to a grander goal: the development and settlement of a new frontier, and the expansion of life and consciousness into the universe.