Holiday Thoughts

Dec 10, 2023

Hello from Morningside! Another week, another post. Gee, I haven’t been able to say that in a while.

Here’s what’s been on my mind the past couple months!

(New here? Check out my Fall Thoughts for more!)

In the distant future, long after the first Dyson spheres and planet-sized brains have been built, when the galaxy will have been mined dry of free energy and the stars will all be dead, Hydrogen will become a scarce, protected resource. The new sustainable imperative will be to reduce our dependence on fusion.
Only heavy elements will be left. Thus, in the cold dark cosmic clouds of dust, the truest green energy of all will finally reveal itself — our final respite from entropy: fission.
After the Dyson Sphere will come the Fission Prism. Credit: DALL-E 3

Would you drink lab-grown breast milk?
My pet theory for why some studies show that ice cream is actually healthy — upending nutritionists’ conventional wisdom — is simply that its makeup closely resembles the very food that was evolved to optimally feed us (granted, as babies). I wouldn’t be completely surprised if lab-grown breast milk someday becomes widely touted as an effective meal replacement.

Dream job: become a Mars influencer. As space travel becomes considerably cheaper, send high-resolution camera drones to Mars to document impossible canyons, howling dust storms, and the terraforming process as it unfolds.

Isn’t it weirdly sci-fi how the French word for gasoline is “essence”?
Another divine food: the remarkably fragrant Persian stew of pomegranate, walnut, and chicken known as Khoresh-e Fesenjoon. It’s one of the dishes I miss the most since going semi-ostrovegan. I hope to develop a version that will work with mussels.

Speaking of pomegranates (in French, pomme-grenade), I had ChatGPT come up with a cocktail that comprised of the most explosive sounding ingredients possible. It’s a variant on the Cherry Bomb, the Cherry Blitz:
- 1/2 oz Pomegranate Grenadine
- 1/2 shot of Fireball Whisky
- 1/2 shot of Jägermeister
- 1 maraschino cherry for garnish
- 1 pint glass half-filled with a cherry-flavored beer or hard cherry cider
It is made by dropping the shot of mixed liquors and grenadine into the glass of cherry beer below.

High up on my ostrovegan bucket list: the Marathon du Médoc, a marathon race in France interspersed with wine and oyster tasting.

Finally got around to watching Being There, a great film from 1979. The movie is basically the original IQ Bell Curve meme, with Peter Sellers playing an archetypal idiot Zen master: a gardener with no experience of the real world who, suddenly unleashed upon it, earns widespread admiration by saying simple aphorisms about gardening that are mistaken for deep wisdom.

Apparently kids these days are drinking borg: a mix of water, vodka, Kool-Aid, and Pedialyte. While disturbing, the idea of combining a pre-post hangover remedy with the booze itself also sounds kind of brilliant. Someone could make a lot of money selling a low-ABV electrolyte drink that actively hydrates you while getting you tipsy hangover-free. Why doesn’t that exist?

As the OpenAI board shenanigans were unfolding and the reality that the company would go under became increasingly plausible, I asked DALL-E to come up with its final dying masterpiece:
Credit: DALL-E 3

Someone proposed a way for V.C.’s to de-risk the potential for spectacular startup failures: ask for the movie rights when investing.
Perhaps startup incubators ought to have in-house documentary film studios that record every second of each startup's trajectory, but are bound by NDA not to release details until the movie is made.

The U.S. Constitution is frustratingly problematic and hard to change. But with the upcoming rise of A.G.I., it’s debatable whether the U.S. government will be the most powerful entity on Earth much longer. We ought to get various A.I. research labs to sign on to enact a state-of-the-art global constitution in the eventuality that they’re the ones that become all-powerful first.

We have no guarantee of continuity of consciousness, we just assume it based on our memories, which could very well be implanted. Since you can’t know whether you’ll ever experience the consequences of your acts today, I posit that experiencing pain for future gain is inherently altruistic.

Some corrections are due for last week’s piece on foie gras, based on a friend’s thoughtful response. First off, it bears mentioning that a foie gras liver is a diseased liver; any duck meant to harbor a liver of that size is suffering, no matter what process you fed that duck by. Second, the duck is patently not a “sweet and gentle creature.” I’ve added these to my Mistakes and Corrections.