MACHINE CHAOS

THIS WEEK:

A recent New Scientist cartoon.

Employers liked offering this structure because then they didn't have to like, try to guess how long the invasion of spain will take and then carry 800 coins per soldier around the battlefield where it could be captured. It also gives them the chance to budget around the assumption that they take an enemy city and *find* vast sums of treasure even if they don't have the full value at the beginning of the war.

The main flaw of this system is that it's very easy to end up in a scenario where if you have, say, 50,000 guys that have been fighting for 800 days, you now owe 40 million silver to your army, and if the budget has not worked out to a 40 million surplus, you literally can't afford to end the war, but you can probably afford to pay them for a couple more weeks. So then you have to start thinking creatively.

I assume that's a more modern historian coming up with a clever characterization of army pay, but all I've been able to find is either sites talking about modern fast food wages or else a thousand articles about "why ancient roman soldiers were paid in salt"

(I had a brief moment of recognition reading that, because "opsonins" in immunology are a category of proteins that stick to foreign objects and make them tasty to your immune cells.)

Beanie Baby Bear (the animal):

Also registers as Bear (the animal) To me:

Please make sure you have a reminder in your phone reminding you to not look at 2028/32/36 Democratic candidates and say "why are they not promising/delivering Cool Shit?" because you are going to understand that to get Cool Shit we must have competent people running a decently funded government, and we are not going to have that.

We are not getting UBI. We are not getting single payer healthcare. We are not getting free college or free preschool. We are not redistributing wealth on a large scale. We are not getting free internet. We are not getting ranked choice voting.

Biden/Harris lost on promising business as usual, a candidate promising to go back to Biden levels and then maybe letting things progress from there after their own term is over is just dead in the water.

I'd rather put up a note reminding me that people are still going to be shooting themselves in the foot by arguing for less when they should be demanding more.

That, and you're waiting until 2028? If we take the house and senate this year, we can get the next impeachment to stick as a conviction and have Trump out the door in 2027 soon after they begin session. Try looking for primary candidates who aren't in the Epstein files.

Bio-inspired nanochannels provide experimental evidence for uncovering brain memory mechanisms

A research team from the Institute of Modern Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Lanzhou University has obtained important experimental evidence for revealing brain memory mechanisms and developing a new type of neuromorphic computing. Their findings are published in Advanced Functional Materials. Human learning and memory originate from highly dynamic connections between neural synapses. These structures act as intelligent switches that transmit signals and undergo dynamic remodeling, thereby enabling the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information and serving as the biological basis for cognition and behavioral adaptation.