Book review of “Livewired. The inside story of the ever-changing brain”

Preface. This book conveys a sense of wonderment and awe about our brains work and how we become who we are.  I think if you read the excerpts below you will understand why Artificial Intelligence will probably never come close to general intelligence and being as smart as human beings — able to learn, have emotions and consequently motivation and curiosity. Heck, I doubt AI will even become as intelligent as ants after reading “Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration” by Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson.

Our brains have 86 billion neurons with 200 trillion connections that constantly grow, die, or change as we live our lives and learn from our experiences. Computer neural networks will never be that complex or able to change themselves flexibly — they are hard-wired, not LIVE wired.  Which means AI is not an existential threat unless some idiot gives AI software written by humans has complete authority over deciding whether to launch nuclear weapons after Congress votes to take that choice away from the President.  Now there’s an existential threat…

Here are some of the main ideas:

“…Our brain machinery isn’t fully preprogrammed, but instead shapes itself by interacting with the world. As we grow, we constantly rewrite our brain’s circuitry to tackle challenges, leverage opportunities, and understand the social structures around us. Our species has successfully taken over every corner of the globe because we represent the highest expression of a trick that Mother Nature discovered: don’t entirely pre-script the brain; instead, just set it up with the basic building blocks and get it into the world.

If you had a magical video camera with which to zoom in to the living, microscopic cosmos inside the skull, you would witness the neurons’ tentacle-like extensions grasping around, feeling, bumping against one another, searching for the right connections to form or forgo, like citizens of a country establishing friendships, marriages, neighborhoods, political parties, vendettas, and social networks. The elaborate pattern of connections in the brain—the circuitry—is full of life: connections between neurons ceaselessly blossom, die, and reconfigure. You are a different person than you were at this time last year, because the gargantuan tapestry of your brain has woven itself into something new.

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The conveyor belt may be slowing down — Yikes!

Preface. The conveyor belt (AMOC: Atlantic meridional overturning circulation) may be slowing down. If it stops, floods, increased sea level rise, and disturbed weather systems.

Until recently the IPCC and other scientists didn’t think this might happen until 2300 or so, but the latest research shows that it could happen much sooner and more suddenly than expected.

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Battery Energy storage batteries (BESS) too complex to ever be commercial

Source: RWE connects its first utility-scale battery storage project to the California grid

Preface.  In 2024 if all of the BESS battery storage time were added up, they could store 8 of the 8,760 hours of annual electricity generated in the USA.  Only 5% of their energy is used to actually store energy, the rest is arbitrage to quickly balance fluctuations caused by wind and solar living and dying.  Yet we need from one (720 hours) or three or more months of energy storage (2160) of 4200 TWh annual electricity to cope for the seasonality of wind and solar in a 100% renewable grid.  But it isn’t simply a matter of building more energy storage batteries, because the technology they rest upon is shaky and unstable and complex.

Most states are too flat to develop pumped hydro storage, the only commercial option today.  PHS is also very expensive and can cost billions of dollars in the few places where one might even be put since the best spots were built decades ago.  One of the few ways to balance wind and solar without using natural gas are batteries.  Other posts explain why these won’t scale up, but that’s just the beginning of their problems as you’ll see in the two articles below.

This paragraph especially struck me: Cell imbalances can occur because battery energy storage systems comprise of hundreds of thousands of individual battery cells, and while these cells are part of the same system, they vary in quality and aging. The weakest cell among them dictates the performance. Thus, when the BESS is charged, not every cell will charge to the same targeted value (e.g., 100% SoC). At the same time, when discharged, not every cell will be discharged to the same planned value (e.g., 0% SoC).

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New war and energy alliances over next resource wars

Preface. My greatest existential fear is nuclear war over the remaining resources on earth, since that has the potential of driving us extinct.  I don’t believe there are enough fossil fuels left to do that via climate change because world conventional and unconventional oil peaked in 2018, the master resource that makes all others possible — coal and natural gas too — and which combined have destroyed the biodiversity and polluted the earth immensely. Humans with wood sticks and horses and setting fires for more browse for deer or kangaroos simply can’t do enough damage to matter, the earth heals again.

The war in Ukraine is all about resources (Britannica Ukraine Resources and Power). It may be the start of many more wars in the future.

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Book review of “Siege: Trump Under fire”

Preface.  Wolff’s book continues the mordant humor of Fire & Fury.  His books are the best, by far, of the dozens I’ve read about the Trump Administration.  There will never be any books as insightful because Wolff was given unprecedented access. And so much fun to read too.

It amazes me that Fire & Fury didn’t force Trump out of office, since it clearly shows that he is too incompetent, unfocused, corrupt, and crazy to be President. The Mueller report or Ukraine impeachment trial the public knows the most about don’t begin to hint at all the corruption and stupidity of what’s going on in this administration.

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Why do people vote for Trump?

Preface. Before the election, it was widely known that Trump was a gangster who bragged about grabbing women’s asses, lied over 30,000 times during his term, went bankrupt 4 times, and much more. So how could people have voted for him?  Here’s a concise summary from Psychology Today.

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Book review of “Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID”

Preface.  This is a book review of “Pandemic Politics” about the myriad ways Trump mishandled the covid-19 pandemic. With the 2024 election coming up, it is a good time to remember how spectacularly Trump failed in managing covid-19.

In 2016 Trump said “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”   He was far too modest, he killed hundreds of thousands of Americans and lost few supporters.

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The evolution of the Republican party from 1960 to 2024: from moderate democracy to extreme authoritarianism

Preface (long). Over time the planks grew more and more religious, stopped mentioning voting rights in 1980 as well as a war on regulations, stopped supporting the equal rights for women, could care less about abortion to being against it to gain more votes.

A few from the 2024 platform: Drill baby drill, complete the border wall, carry out the largest deportation operation in American history, use existing Federal Law to keep foreign Christian-hating Communists, Marxists, and Socialists out of America, defend the right to mine Bitcoin, support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing

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Why some people are conservative and others liberal

Preface. A book review of: Garcia, H. 2019. Sex, Power, and Partisanship. How evolutionary science makes sense of our political divide.

Although Chris Mooney’s book “The Republican Brain” was brilliant, it didn’t address that politics must surely go back to the origin of modern humans 300,000 years ago. 

Garcia’s book addresses this, looking at politics from an evolutionary point of view. One finding I thought quite interesting was why women tend to be more liberal and men more conservative as can be seen in the 2024 U.S. election, men favor right-wing extremist Trump 25 points more than women in North Carolina, 19 points more in Michigan, 20 points more in Wisconsin, and 12 points more in  Georgia & Pennsylvania.

Evolutionary psychology is a field that rests on the understanding that we humans have spent 99% of our history in small bands of hunter-gatherers, living in environments very different from those in which we currently reside. Survival in those environments was harsh, with perpetual threats from predators, starvation, disease, and violence from outside tribes. These are the environments in which our political predispositions evolved.” 

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Book review: Bring the War Home: The white power movement & paramilitary America

Preface.  This is a book review of Belew’s “Bring the war home: The white power movement and paramilitary America”.

In hard times in the future, racist white republican groups, many who were or are in the military, could make regions of the country deadly for minorities, liberals, non-Christian religious groups ad so on, forming small armies going home to home to take food, cattle, money, guns, and anything else of value. 

Belew documents how they have far more guns and other weapons than you can possibly imagine from bank robberies, dozens of illegal and often violent crimes, and selling drugs. Above all, stockpiles of weaponry that military men have stolen from where they’re stationed:

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