--- Log opened Mon Dec 20 00:00:06 2021
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09:05 < muurkha> I have a hypothesis about this fake nanotechnology thing
09:05 < muurkha> you know about Project Huemul?
09:10 < muurkha> that sort of thing is a major cause of economic development failures like the Great Leap Forward
09:17 < muurkha> if you read www.nano.gov/sites/default/files/pub_resource/research_directions_1999.pdf you'll see they pay lip service to the Feynman/Drexler vision in the Executive Summary, cite many experts from the 01990s endorsing it in the Technical Summary, and then use it to promote lame things like "nanoparticle-reinforced polymers in lighter cars".  very much trying to get to the moon by climbing a higher 
09:17 < muurkha> tree
09:32 < muurkha> it's a similar dynamic to the Fontus water bottle, though the things the National Nanotechnology Initiative spent a billion dollars a year on were at least working, worthwhile science and technology, even if they weren't actually nanotechnology
09:32 < muurkha> unlike Fontus and Huemul
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09:34 < muurkha> but in all three cases the dynamic was that funders asked for something they didn't understand; makers who couldn't deliver it nevertheless promised it; funders paid makers; makers failed to deliver
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11:18 < juri_> because that never happens.
11:24 < muurkha> well, my hypothesis is that it's a thing that happens often enough to be a major cause of economic development failures
11:24 < muurkha> what do you think?
12:05 < fenn> "Richter had studied under Heinrich Rausch von Traubenberg in the 1930s, who described him as a peculiar eccentric, but von Traubenberg had died in 1944 so there was no way to follow up on the story. Richter's dissertation was never published, and the university in Prague burned during the war."
12:07 < fenn> i don't think anyone could have known in 1951 that controlled fusion was not easy to achieve
12:07 < fenn> it seems awfully presumptuous to state that this talented physicist is full of hot air, based on some personality quirk
12:08 < fenn> and then it got complicated by politics, of course
12:08 < fenn> who knows, maybe there ARE small fusion reactors that have been operational for the last 60 years
12:10 < fenn> if you wanted to stifle successful research, you'd do basically what's being done right now: funnel all funding into an approach that's guaranteed not to work, then get everybody on board with building the biggest boondoggle ever, at a cost of tens of billions of dollars, at which point nobody is going to back down and say it's a mistake, and they knew it was a bad idea all along
12:10 < fenn> aka ITER
12:10 < muurkha> heh, I thought you meant NNI
12:10 < muurkha> and I was going to protest that it has produced some useful results ;)
12:10 < fenn> NNI is just hangers-on who don't care about atomically precise manufacturing. they just smell fresh meat and will dress in "nanotech" clothing if it gets them the bucks
12:11 < muurkha> exactly
12:11 < muurkha> I agree that nobody knew how hard fusion power was in 01951, but Lise Meitner is recorded as having thought Richter was mistaken about his results a lot earlier than that
12:11 < fenn> this is the first i've heard of project huemul
12:11 < fenn> i don't understand how building a 4 meter thick cylinder caused a national shortage of concrete
12:11 < muurkha> and clearly at some point he descended into deliberate fraud
12:12 < muurkha> I suppose it might depend on how big the cylinder was. but remember that Argentina was just starting to industrialize at that point
12:12 < fenn> would YOU want to disappoint Peron?
12:13 < muurkha> no, no I wouldn't
12:13 < muurkha> I mean he wasn't running a local version of GULAG but he could have ended up there
12:13 < muurkha> I talked to my ex-girlfriend on the phone yesterday (the one who was 19 when we dated, possibly scandalizing kanzure)
12:14 < muurkha> she mentioned that there was a guy she thought was hot until he asked her what her sign was
12:14 < muurkha> at which point his attractiveness suddenly nosedove
12:14 < fenn> scandalous
12:14 < muurkha> then she found out he was Catholic
12:15 < fenn> shocking!
12:15 < muurkha> unattractive
12:15 < muurkha> there's a "libertarian" party here that had some success in the last elections headed by a Catholic anti-abortion guy 
12:15 < muurkha> so I asked her if he'd voted for them
12:15 < fenn> uh, well that's one interpretation i suppose
12:15 < muurkha> "No," she said, "he's ultra Peronist."
12:17 < muurkha> I thought it was interesting that in 02021 she still chose the word "Peronist" ("Peronista" actually) rather than "Kirchnerist", "Justicialist" (the party's official name since Perón's time), or "Frente de Todos", 
12:18 < muurkha> I think that says something about the depth of the cult of personality the Perones were able to cultivate during their lifetimes
12:29 < fenn> "Perón also passed a law providing minimum wages, maximum hours and vacations for rural workers, froze rural rents, presided over a large increase in rural wages"
12:30 < fenn> hmm
12:31 < fenn> i'm having trouble understanding why someone with this viewpoint would call their party "libertarian"
12:32 < muurkha> who, Perón?  he isn't, the "libertarians" (who Mina says are actually "pubertarian" redpillers) are supporting a guy named Javier Milei
12:32 < muurkha> he's a non-Peronist
12:33 < muurkha> it was the superficially hot guy who was, sadly to my ex, ultra Peronist
12:33 < fenn> oh
12:34 < fenn> i thought your girlfriend was libertarian-leaning, and you had asked who she voted for
12:34 < fenn> is being catholic an unusual thing in argentina?
12:34 < muurkha> well, nominally no, in reality yes
12:36 < muurkha> something like 90% of the population has been baptized Roman Catholic, but Argentina has never been Christian in more than name
12:37 < fenn> that's remarkably high coverage for an unenthusiastic populace
12:37 < muurkha> and the Catholic Church was one of the biggest supporters of the last dictatorship (installed by a coup against Perón's widow)
12:37 < fenn> better than vaccination rates i bet
12:38 < muurkha> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentina says it's 62.9% Roman Catholic, which is probably the church's membership figures and not the results of a survey?
12:39 < muurkha> hmm, nope, survey
12:39 < muurkha> of 2421 people
12:40 < fenn> peronist is easier to say
12:41 < muurkha> yeah but you could say "PJ", [pexota]
12:41 < muurkha> down from 76.5% in the last survey in 02008
12:47 < muurkha> from the same survey only 30.3% of those who say they believe in God go to a temple or church
12:47 < muurkha> and only 26.5% of the "Catholics"
12:47 < muurkha> .units 62.9% 26.5% in %
12:47 < saxo> 	62.9% 26.5% = 16.6685 % 	62.9% 26.5% = (1 / 0.059993401) % 
12:48 < muurkha> so 17% of the population goes to Catholic churches, so being Catholic in that way is indeed an unusual thing in Argentina
12:48 < muurkha> (p. 24, 28/72)
12:51 < muurkha> of http://www.ceil-conicet.gov.ar/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/ii25-2encuestacreencias.pdf
12:53 < fenn> ok i get the point
12:54 < fenn> i guess i would have just taken the survey numbers at face value
12:56 < fenn> according to this survey, 10% of catholics do yoga or transcendental meditation
13:17 < muurkha> the thing I thought was funniest was that the Catholics have a higher than average belief in UFOs ("Ovnis")
13:17 < muurkha> but it turns out that's not because the nonreligious people have lower belief in UFOs; in fact the nonreligious people believe in UFOs even more than the Catholics
13:18 < muurkha> it's because the evangelicals have very low belief in UFOs, dragging down the average
13:56 < juri_> I thought it was because the catholics read the part of the bible which contains a description of a UFO, and the evangelicals are too busy bombing abortion clinics to bother.
13:58 < muurkha> no, there haven't been a lot of bombings here lately, it's not like the US
13:58 < muurkha> there was a big one in 01994
13:59 < muurkha> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Terrorist_incidents_in_Argentina_in_the_1990s
14:00 < muurkha> contrast two pages with the six subcategories of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Terrorist_incidents_in_the_United_States_in_the_1990s and the six pages in two subcategories in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Terrorist_incidents_in_the_United_States_in_the_2020s
16:12 < maaku> well, we also like to apply the T word to everything
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18:18 < muurkha> troo
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--- Log closed Tue Dec 21 00:00:07 2021