James' World 2

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• Many philosophers and scientists have pondered if we live in a simulated universe, and University of Portsmouth scientist Melvin Vopson believes he has evidence.

• Using his previously formulated Second Law of Infodynamics, Vopson claims that the decrease of entropy in information systems over time could prove that the universe has a built-in “data optimization and compression,” which speaks to its digital nature.

• While these claims warrant investigation, they’re far from a discovery themselves, and would likely need rigorous proof for the scientific community at large to seriously consider this theory.

In the 1999 film The Matrix, Thomas Anderson (a.k.a. Neo) discovers a truth to end all truths—the universe is a simulation. While this premise provides fantastic sci-fi fodder (and explains how Neo can learn kung-fu in about five seconds), the idea isn’t quite as carefully relegated to the fiction section as one might expect.

University of Portsmouth scientist Melvin Vopson, who studies the possibility that the universe might indeed be a digital facsimile, leans into the cinematic comparison. In an article published on website The Conversation this past October, Vopson invoked the Wachowskis’ sci-fi masterpiece, and around the same time, he published a book on the subject—Reality Reloaded, a subtle hat tip to the title of the less successful Matrix sequel. While he is just one among many who’ve contemplated the idea, Vopson claims to have one thing that those before him lacked: evidence.

“In physics, there are laws that govern everything that happens in the universe, for example how objects move, how energy flows, and so on. Everything is based on the laws of physics,” Vopson said back in 2022. “One of the most powerful laws is the second law of thermodynamics, which establishes that entropy—a measure of disorder in an isolated system – can only increase or stay the same, but it will never decrease.”

Based on this famous law, Vopson similarly expected that entropy in information systems—which his previous research defined as a “fifth state of matter”—should similarly increase over time. But it doesn’t. Instead, it remains constant, or even decreases to a minimum value at equilibrium. This is in direct contrast to the second law of thermodynamics, which inspired Vopson to adopt the Second Law of Information Dynamics (or Infodynamics).

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Kitchen sinking refers to the tendency for partners to bring up a list of past grievances and unrelated issues during arguments, diverting attention from the current topic of discussion. This cluttered mix of complaints, criticisms, and unresolved issues make it difficult to address the original concern effectively.

This communication pattern is detrimental to relationships because it muddles the core issue, leading to confusion and emotional overwhelm. By inundating discussions with past grievances, partners may feel invalidated or attacked, hindering open and constructive dialogue.

Consequently, kitchen sinking can escalate conflict and erode trust and intimacy, fostering an atmosphere of defensiveness and misunderstanding rather than promoting resolution and mutual respect in relationships.

Here are five ways to stop “kitchen sinking” your partner and work through conflict healthily.

1. Be Intentional

Before engaging in important discussions, decide on the specific issue you want to address and remain mindful of where the conversation is going. Bring yourself back to the present when you catch yourself recollecting different negative instances or feeling the need to bring them up. Avoid blaming, criticizing, and using aggressive language or tone to assert dominance or control.

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Here’s how to avoid letting relationship issues build up and explode at the wrong time.  Getty

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In the 1970s, chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis put forth a bold theory: The Earth is a giant living organism.

When a mammal is hot, it sweats to cool itself off. If you nick your skin with a knife, the skin will scab and heal. Lovelock and Margulis argued that our planet has similar processes of self-regulation, which, arguably, make it seem like the Earth itself is alive.

The idea wasn’t unprecedented in human history. “The fundamental concept of a living world is ancient,” says Ferris Jabr, a science journalist and author of the upcoming book Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life. The book explores all the ways life has shaped our physical world and, in doing so, inevitably revisits the question “Is the Earth alive?”

Lovelock and Margulis called the idea “the Gaia Hypothesis” — named after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth. It was openly mocked by many in mainstream Western science. “For many decades, the Gaia hypothesis was considered kind of this fringe sort of woo-woo idea,” Jabr says. “Because for biologists,” Jabr says, life is a specific thing. “It is typically thought of as an organism that is a product of Darwinian evolution by natural selection. And Earth as a planet does not meet those criteria.”

It didn’t help that the original articulation of Gaia granted Earth a certain degree of sentience. The hypothesis argued “all of the living organisms on Earth are collaborating to deliberately create a climate that is suitable for life,” as Jabr says. But yet, this idea has persisted, for a few reasons. Scientists have never been able to precisely define what life is. So, it’s been hard to dismiss Gaia completely.

The Gaia hypothesis has also evolved over the years. Later iterations deemphasized that life was “collaborating” to transform the Earth, Jabr explains. Which still leaves a lot to be explored: Certainly living things don’t need to be thought of as conscious, or have agency, to be considered alive. Consider the clam, which lacks a central nervous system.

Jabr found in the years since Gaia was first introduced, scientists have uncovered more connections between biology, ecology, and geology, which make the boundaries between these disciplines appear even more fuzzy. The Amazon rainforest essentially “summons” its own rain, as Jabr explains in his book. They learned how life is involved in the process that generated the continents. Life plays a role in regulating Earth’s temperature. They’ve learned that just about everywhere you look on Earth, you find life influencing the physical properties of our planet.

In reporting his book, Jabr comes to the conclusion that not only is the Earth indeed a living creature, but thinking about it in such a way might help inspire action in dealing with the climate crisis.

Brian Resnick spoke to Jabr for an episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s podcast that explores scientific mysteries, unanswered questions, and all the things we learn by diving into the unknown. You can listen to the full conversation here. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Rachel Victoria Hillis for Vox

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Inside every rechargeable battery—in electric cars and phones and robot vacuums—lurks a cosmic mystery. The lithium that we use to power much of our lives these days is so common as to seem almost prosaic. But this element turns out to be a wild card, a rebel that’s been challenging our most basic understanding of the formation of the universe itself. 

Beyond the lithium ion-powered batteries, beyond the glass and ceramic manufacture, optical systems, air purification, fireworks and rocket propellants, nuclear weapons, and mood stabilizing pills, lithium is cast about the cosmos. But there is not nearly as much of it out there as there should be. And we don’t know why. 

This wily little element has defied explanation for generations, refusing to obey the rest of our cosmological orthodoxy. The robust Big Bang theory, among other accomplishments, allows us to precisely predict the abundances of all of the light elements across the universe.

Except lithium.

Which means there might be something wrong with our understanding of the Big Bang. There might be something wrong with our measurements. There might be something wrong with both. Or this might be a signal that there are new, as-yet undiscovered forces that were at work in the early universe. Whatever the solution is, this rebel and its so-called “cosmological lithium problem” are here to teach us a radical new fact about the universe.

We just have to figure it out.

Here on Earth, lithium had laid underfoot since the planet’s formation, with nobody suspecting that the element even existed. Taken from the Greek word for “rock,” on Earth, lithium is usually only found in trace amounts in larger mineral conglomerations. In 1800, the Brazilian chemist José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva discovered it as a new ore on the island of Uto, Sweden. Seventeen years later, the chemist Jöns Jakob Berzelius isolated the new element within the ore. Since then, the silvery-white metal has found itself making possible so many of our contemporary luxuries.

But most of the universe’s lithium is bound up inside of stars.

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What a missing element can teach us about the universe.

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This is tricky, click each title 1 through 5 for the long read desired, and close the new tab when you’re finished, then choose the next title. Enjoy!

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A glimpse into this week’s list:

• Forcibly displacing the Maasai tribe in the name of “conservation.”
• The death of an Alabama pastor—and the grief of the community he left behind.
• Studying Alaska’s little brown bats.
• A dispatch from a conference on artificial intelligence.
• Remembering Shaun of the Dead, 20 years later.

1. The Great Serengeti Land Grab

Stephanie McCrummen | The Atlantic | April 8, 2024 | 8,385 words

The pastoral, semi-nomadic Maasai have lived on their land in northern Tanzania since the 17th century. But under the guise of conservation and modernization, the Tanzanian government is resettling the tribe, destroying their compounds and seizing their cattle—in other words, erasing their traditional way of life.

etc, etc, etc,. —CLR

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Myotis lucifugus (little brown bat). Image by Joe McDonald/Getty Images.

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Sorry, gross…

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Mucus is not widely considered a topic for polite conversation. It’s something to be discreetly blown into a tissue, folded up, and thrown away.

But the simple truth is that without mucus, you wouldn’t be alive.

“Mucus is essential for the protection of your body,” says Jeffrey Spiegel, an ear, nose, and throat surgeon at Boston University. “It’s a protective barrier, and it allows you to breathe comfortably. If you had no mucus, you’d be quite sorry you didn’t.”

Given how important mucus is — and how often colds and allergies cause mucus-related symptoms — it’s worth learning a bit more about it.

1) You produce about 1.5 quarts of mucus a day — and swallow the vast majority

Most of us think of mucus as something that leaks from our nose, but the truth is that it also gets secreted in your trachea and other tubes that carry air through your lungs, where it’s technically called phlegm. Wherever it’s produced, mucus is a mix of water and proteins, and most of it gets pushed to the back of your throat by microscopic hairs called cilia.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, you’re constantly swallowing all this mucus, and it harmlessly ends up in your stomach. “You’re swallowing, on average, twice a minute — even when you’re sleeping at night,” says Michael Ellis, an ear, nose, and throat doctor at Tulane University.

Ellis says that, on average, a person produces about 1.5 quarts of mucus per day, and contrary to what you might think, it doesn’t vary by all that much. But that mucus gets diluted by a separate, watery secretion (called serous fluid), which can vary widely based on your health.

2) Mucus is basically the body’s flypaper

Mucus has two main functions: it keeps the nasal cavity and the other airways inside your body moist, preventing them from drying out due to all the air that flows over them. (Relatedly, the serous fluid that mucus is mixed with also moistens the air itself before it enters the lungs.)

Mucus’ other function, though, might surprise you. “Mucus is kind of like flypaper,” Ellis says. “Debris that comes into the nose or throat sticks to it, and then you swallow it, so it doesn’t get into your lungs.”

Mucus, in other words, is nature’s filter for your delicate lungs. The bacteria, dust, and other tiny particles that you breathe in get stuck in mucus and pulled down into your stomach, where they’re destroyed by enzymes.

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I know for sure that many different types of species are operating hyper-advanced aerodynamic platforms, and they’re visiting Earth, coming and going like taxis. As to who these operators are, I don’t know. Are they interdimensional, inter-realm, interplanetary?

I’ve had four vivid sightings of craft that were not jets, helicopters, or planes.

I was on my motorcycle about eight o’clock at night, and I saw a red beacon flying over the high-tension power lines. There was no sound. It stops right above my motorcycle and shines a light on me. I look up, totally delighted. And the light winks off, and this thing drifts off over the field again.

My dad was an absolute absurdist. He would go to a grocery store, grab a roll of paper towels, and whip them over to the next aisle to hear the reaction. “Oh, whoa, whoa!” He was wonderful.

I was very mouthy in class all the way through high school because I knew I could get laughs. I was not a good student, but I was an entertaining one.

My parents enrolled me in the St. Pius X minor preparatory seminary for boys, which was a priest school in Ottawa. So I went there from grade 9, 10, 11, and I was asked to leave, dismissed in a letter saying, “We believe your son is not a suitable candidate for the priesthood.”

A little under half the year, I’m at the farm in Ontario. It’s where the family settled in 1826.

We had a family medium, and frequent séances took place in the old farmhouse in the 1930s and ’40s, usually on a Sunday morning. The big black Chryslers, Packards, Cadillacs, and Lincolns would come in with the big bosomy matrons and their tiny, skinny little husbands. They’d sit around the table and my great-grandfather Samuel would host.

I was studying criminology at Carleton University and expecting that I would go into the corrections service, having worked a summer as a Clerk 5 in the Penitentiary Service of Canada doing inmate catalogs.

I wrote a manual for deploying weapons in riots for the commissioner. And I thought, “Well, it’s an interesting profession.”

But I met a woman named Valri Bromfield in high school, and she said, “You’re not going to be a prison guard. You’re coming with me to Toronto.” And she dragged me off with our audition tape that we’d made on cable TV in Ottawa. It got the attention of Lorne Michaels.

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Kevin Nixon

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