You all might also enjoy a 10-minute podcast on the Year Without Summer: https://thememorypalace.us/no-summer/
We have no idea what happens next
11–20 of 38 posts
Re: We have no idea what happens next
#12Why do we celebrate Liebig and his dark lord successor Haber-Bosch? We do get more nitrogen but at the cost of assimilation failure back in the environment. Non-assimilated nitrogen and its volatile compounds create just the conditions for a pandemic virus to develop..
Re: We have no idea what happens next
#13Reads a bit like a 'Connections' episode :-) But I agree with the fundamental premise, the harder you perturb a system, the less predictable the output of the perturbation will be. This year has shown a lot of people (myself included) that they can live in a very different way in the world. Some of that may become the new normal.
I completely agree. For those who haven't experienced Connections-style history, four episodes are on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ
My favorite is this one about proto-computers that came about due to the Black Death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6yL0_sDnX0
Re: We have no idea what happens next
#14Why do we celebrate Liebig and his dark lord successor Haber-Bosch? We do get more nitrogen but at the cost of assimilation failure back in the environment. Non-assimilated nitrogen and its volatile compounds create just the conditions for a pandemic virus to develop..
I guess go convince four billion they should never have been born because we need more nitrogen assimilation ...
Re: We have no idea what happens next
#15Variance, diversity, and large population can solve problems by chance. Combinatorial diversity due to genetics helps too. It may suck for some individuals, but for humanity as a whole, 'tis good.
Re: We have no idea what happens next
#16Why do we celebrate Liebig and his dark lord successor Haber-Bosch? We do get more nitrogen but at the cost of assimilation failure back in the environment. Non-assimilated nitrogen and its volatile compounds create just the conditions for a pandemic virus to develop..
I guess go convince four billion they should never have been born because we need more nitrogen assimilation ...
Sure, we could do a rousing rendition of Monty Python's "Every Sperm Is Sacred". There's a theoretically infinite number of people who aren't being born.
On the other hand, lots of people dying of Malthusian starvation would not have been pretty.
There's probably some reasonable middle ground here.
Re: We have no idea what happens next
#17Tangentially, when COVID-19 forced my company to go work from home it thrust in to my face all the things that about that company that made me hate my job and gave me anxiety attacks. I ultimately quit that job with nothing lined up and found a much more fulfilling job, with better pay. I don't think I would have quit that last job if it wasn't for the disruption, and I would have still been miserable.
Congrats on taking that decision. I bet it felt empowering.
I'm very tempted to do the same, tomorrow morning possibly. I only stuck out my job for so long because it was fully remote before the pandemic and that was hard to find.
Now actually feels like a good time to switch with so many companies forced into remote working and stating they will stick with it.
What kind of things did you hate about your job? Did you face many questions about quitting with nothing lined up?
Re: We have no idea what happens next
#18Tangentially, when COVID-19 forced my company to go work from home it thrust in to my face all the things that about that company that made me hate my job and gave me anxiety attacks. I ultimately quit that job with nothing lined up and found a much more fulfilling job, with better pay. I don't think I would have quit that last job if it wasn't for the disruption, and I would have still been miserable.
Congrats on taking that decision. I bet it felt empowering. I'm very tempted to do the same, tomorrow morning possibly. I only stuck out my job for so long because it was fully remote before the pandemic and that was hard to find. Now actually feels like a good time to switch with so many companies forced into remote working and stating they will stick with it. What kind of things did you hate about your job? Did you…
Go for it :)
Re: We have no idea what happens next
#19Reads a bit like a 'Connections' episode :-) But I agree with the fundamental premise, the harder you perturb a system, the less predictable the output of the perturbation will be. This year has shown a lot of people (myself included) that they can live in a very different way in the world. Some of that may become the new normal.
It does and I feel the example is just as contrived.
The writer seems to imply that Fritz Haber would not have developed the Haber process without Liebig and effectively without the Mt Tambora eruption.
Nice theory, but I don't know if we can be sure of all that.
Re: We have no idea what happens next
#20Reads a bit like a 'Connections' episode :-) But I agree with the fundamental premise, the harder you perturb a system, the less predictable the output of the perturbation will be. This year has shown a lot of people (myself included) that they can live in a very different way in the world. Some of that may become the new normal.
It does and I feel the example is just as contrived. The writer seems to imply that Fritz Haber would not have developed the Haber process without Liebig and effectively without the Mt Tambora eruption. Nice theory, but I don't know if we can be sure of all that.
And even if that were true, Haber and Bosch were not the only nitrogen chemists and chemical engineers working near the state of the art.
The processes might have different names attached, but we'd still have them.