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Holy shit Amber Rudd actually quit.

Welcome!

Boy I sure am glad someone is finally here to tell us how to be really real Discordians.

Completely flattened it!

Do these people just drive off after smashing the nodes?

Do you guys ever have dreams that feel like you have had them before? Like returning to those dream-places feels familiar.

I don't get them often but I had one last night -

I woke up in a treehouse like place (kind of like Centerparcs for UK spags) and had to go get breakfast. I came to a t-junction on the forest path but the left hand path (which is where the 'familiarity' of the dream would have had me go although I don't actually remember having a similar dream now awake) was blocked by a rhinoceros.

I didn't feel like facing down the rhino so went right. This took me down a hill to a country pub. I met my old company's CEO on the path who walked with me down to the hill where we met the R&D director. I didn't feel comfortable having breakfast with them so moved to go back where I came. As I was leaving I walked past a bunch of my new colleagues who called out to me.

End dream.

I guess all the work stuff is some subconscious processing of next week's conference where I will be meeting almost everyone featured and they'll be assessing my progress over the last couple of months. That's really the less interesting part though - it's the feeling of 'I have been here before' that really stuck with me.

Something that starts as a fantasy novel with magic and shit, but magic turns out to be advanced nanotechnology so it ends as a hard scifi.

Probably not original, but that's what I get for being illiterate prick.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Warlock_in_Spite_of_Himself

Right so the reason I mentioned turning CO2 into ethanol/ethylene in the OP is that from there you can pretty much make any plastics you like rather than having to bury it.

Doesn't sound like the technology is quite scalable yet and of course you still need energy/catalysts/other reagents to get from A to B so it might never by economically viable.

So what does closing the loop on plastic recycling look like? For some thermoplastics we can melt and reform them though you usually end up with a loss of properties after going through this a few times. Biodegradable plastics are kind of an oxymoron in that you're trying to create something with long lifespan but that's going to break down upon command. Thermoset plastics are even more difficult in that once they are in a certain 'set' state you can't really do anything but burn them or grind them down.

I've been hearing some ideas about mycoremediation recetntly that  got me thinking about finding some super saprotrophic mushrooms that can break down cellulose and lignin and seeing if they can adapt to breaking down similarly structured plastics.

But even if it's not recyclable, storing solid carbon instead of just burning waste should be used as much as possible if it can limit our environmental footprint.

Can you expand on this? You mean literally just stockpiling plastics etc. rather than burning them because at least you're not kicking off all those fumes?
Problem is you're locking biomass and other resources into unusable forms like this. Granted you aren't necessarily making things worse other than the cost of storage and/or pollution through large or micro/nano sized plastic particles.

So many of you have probably heard about this - Cambridge Analytica are getting some serious heat over Facebook data harvesting, profile targetting, election tampering, bribery, blackmail and all that good stuff.

Said to be involved in Trump, Leave campaign, various other elections around the world.

Weren't they mentioned in the Steele Dossier too?

What do you guys make of all this?

How is Corbyn managing to make such spectacularly unpopular points about this russian poisoning business?

I mean he's right in a way - everyone does just seem to have jumped to conclusions and an independant review is a good idea.

But it's not a good look acting wobbly on people being poisoned in the middle of London.

Ok so it's possible to capture CO2 from combustion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage

And it's possible to turn CO2 into ethanol: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-solar-to-fuel-recycles-co2-ethanol-ethylene.html

But is it possible to capture other combustion by-products as well? Rare earth metals and other expensive elements? If it was I could see combustion becoming a much more viable 'recycling' method.

So i've started reading Beelzebub's Tales..

I am about 1/3rd of the way through at the moment. At first it was hard due to all the made up words and then I was like 'oh hey this is just a weird scifi book'.

Now I am kind of getting into it and there are bits that seem to make sense and other bits that are super far out.

Maybe I should have read something of Ouspensky's first. I can definitely see the benefits of reading this kind of thing in a group - some passages and chapters seem to have a lot to unpack that's clearly going over my head.

[Is Meaning something that we create with our minds?Or does it exist in the universe--external to our minds?]

Well first of all I haven't read any Hofstadter so I feel fully qualified to posit an answer.

Is Meaning something that we create with our minds?

Or does it exist in the universe--external to our minds?




Hofstadter, author of Godel Escher Bach, thinks that meaning is something we decode.  He'd point out that the 'meaning' of 1+1 isn't a human construct.

I could get behind the idea that there's one 'really real' universe where 1+1 always is.

But whether we are decoding the meaning or creating it subjectively I am not sure I see the difference in these two viewpoints?

Who is to say we have decoded the meaning correctly?

Wow that's a blast from the past.

The habbo behind the duck is doing it right.